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  • Title: Grant recipients' rights in question.
    Author: Willson PD.
    Journal: Plan Parent Rev; 1984; 4(1):13-4. PubMed ID: 12266274.
    Abstract:
    Although organizations that provide privately funded abortions or abortion referral and counseling are engaging in constitutionally protected activities, opponents of legal abortion are seeking to deny eligibility for federal family planning funding to them. The issue of the rights of organizations receiving federal funds has been simmering for several years, but in 1984 the US Congress must renew the key federal funding authorization for domestic and international family planning services. The question is an abortion issue but a much larger issue as well, involving the limits of the conditions any government agency can put on activities of organizations it helps to fund. Political activity regarding the question has increased, and includes attempts by 4 states to block award of state family planning funds to organizations using private funds for abortion activities, passage of the Adolescent Family Act which permits funding only to programs that do not advocate abortion, attempts to add antiabortion amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act, termination of US Agency for International Development (AID) funding of the scientific journal International Family Planning Perspectives because it reported the findings of research on the health consequences of illegal abortions, attempts to block USAID funds to the Pathfinder Fund because it used nonfederal funds for abortion-related services, and attempts to exclude the Planned Parenthood Federation of America from the annual Combined Federal Campaign, the federal employee's charitable contributions drive. If new restrictions on government funding of family planning organizations become law in 1984, they could undermine the US commitment to family planning. Only 74 of the 5000 US family planning clinics receiving Title X family planning funds perform abortions, and they use state or private funds. Efforts to block Title X funding to agencies involved in abortion would run counter to the laws and policies of 15 states that pay for abortions for medically indigent patients, and to accepted standards of professional health care that require counseling and referral. The likely result of new restrictive laws would be a greater number of abortions. Private voluntary organizations working in family planning in over 120 nations would have to violate their own charters, which require them to work with the policies of the countries in which they operate, if they had to refuse to support abortion-related activities with nongovernment funds as a condition of receiving US family planning assistance. In 1972, the Supreme Court summed up rulings over several decades on attempts to block government funds to private organizations because of activities they fund from nongovernment sources, stating that the government cannot penalize them by requiring them to forfeit a constitutional right as a condition for receiving government funds.
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