As highlighted by Kansas voters’ resounding decisionThis week, we reject right-wing attempts to strip abortion rights from state constitutions. deadlyOverturn of Roe v. Wade It is wildly unpopularMany voters across the country.
But the same right-wing groups that helped to capture the Supreme Court — backed by ultra-wealthy donors they keep secret from the public — are working overtime to convince us that the overturn of Roe isn’t as dangerous as so many of us know it to be. They are using dark money to cover up this coordinated anti-democratic, Christian right-led effort to control our political system.
The Supreme Court handed down the ruling by the far right faction Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health OrganizationDecision overturned RoeIt was created by a huge dark money network coordinated by Leonard Leo, a right-wing Catholic lawyer and fundraiser for Federalist Society. His network has raised nearly $1.2 million. $600 millionSecret funding since 2014, excluding the past year. Donald Trump was personally hand-selected by Leo three of the five justices who ruled against him Roe,And he worked to get them all on the court. His affiliated dark money groups worked tirelessly to push the Trump nominees onto a bench, despite widespread and deep concerns over their fitness to be judges.
Leo predicted the success of his agenda in a speech to funders of the secretive Christian-right Council for National Policy in reversing precedents and turning back Americans’ rights to the pre-New Deal/robber baron era. He bragged that “no one in this room has probably experienced the kind of transformation that I think we are beginning to see” in rulings by the court.
Leo’s network cannot be entirely separated from the dark money web of fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch, who is a major funder of the Federalist Society and many of the groups that have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court this term and in previous terms. Koch’s Americans for Prosperity organization spent millions to support the confirmation of Trump appointees, including Amy Coney Barrett, the daughter of a man who worked for decades as a fossil fuel industry lawyer. It’s no great mystery why. Koch’s company, Koch Industries, will likely reap untold billions from decisions favoring the carbon industry, like the reactionary edict recently handed down by the Court’s right-wing faction in West Virginia v. EPA.
These are the same dark money organizations that helped to overturn Roe They have their sights set on attacking other fundamental freedoms. However, some of these dark money groups are trying to market bogus ideas that downplay the severity and impact of the overturning of fundamental rights to the public. RoeEven though it will cause a wave in forced births, and maternal deaths. Here are some of the bogus claims they’re trying to push:
Bogus Claim #1 – The Overturning of Roe Won’t Hurt Anyone
Research has shown that abortion prohibitions, such as those that went into effect in 22 states immediately following the overturning of the Supreme Judicial Court, can be effective. RoeThis could lead to a 21 percent increaseIn pregnancy-related deaths in a country with one of the highest rates of mortality in the industrialized globe.
Yet, dark money actors like Erin Hawley — an anti-abortion zealotWho is the antiLGBTQ co-counsel hate groupAlliance Defending Freedom’s legal attack on Roe — are being given national platforms to convince the public otherwise. Hawley was recently a GOP minority witness regarding the impact of Roe’s overturn before the Senate Oversight and Reform Committee where she peddled disinformation.
One example was her medically false testimony. claimAbortions for nonviable ectopic pregnancy are not abortions. She also claimed that forcing women to carry a term pregnancy will not cause harm to them or their unborn babies. riskierRather than an abortion. Hawley ignores the psychological harmThat would be done to rape victims who are forced to carry their pregnancies to term. economic harmPeople who would otherwise choose to terminate a pregnancy are subject to the same harms as those who are forced to stay with abusers because of a forced pregnancy.
Hawley, who is married with insurrectionist Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri (R-Missouri), is taken in $617,000 from the Koch-funded Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), where she is a legal fellow. IWF and its sister organization have received more than $5 million from Leo’s dark money network since 2014. Hawley’s other employer, ADF, also received six-figure Koch funding, according to the most recent IRS filings.
In the meantime, right-wing dark-money actors are working to discredit all the terrible implications of the reverse of Roe. The best-known example is probably the discrediting by dark money groups of the true story about the 10-year old rape victim, who was made to by the Ohio abortion ban. This ban was put in place after the overturn of RoeTo travel to Indiana, where abortions are legal, click here
Right-wing pundits such as Emily Jashinsky, an IWF colleague, cast doubt on the veracity and accuracy of the story published by the well-established Indianapolis Star paper. (The Washington PostAlso, he questioned the story.
Although the story was quickly proven to be true, other casesChristian-right reactionaries claim that abortion restrictions are causing harm to people whose lives were threatened by them. Alexandra DeSanctis Martr is a visiting fellow at dark money Ethics and Public Policy Center, (EPPC), that has also received funding through the Koch fortune. Leo network, accused “abortion supporters” of inventing “horrifying hypotheticals” to undermine abortion restrictions.
This appears to be an attempt to denial and chill accurate reporting on the dystopian post-truth.Roe life. (Notably, EPPC’s senior fellow Ed Whelan promoted his own wild conspiracy theories about Christine Blasey Ford in his support for Kavanaugh’s confirmation.)
Bogus Claim #2. Anti-Choice Zealots will Secure Comprehensive Aid for People Forced into Giving Birth
Dark money court capture groups may also be trying to save the GOP’s reputation and the Christian nationist movement. They claim they will provide aid to people who are forced to have children against their will. Going into the midterms, the GOP’s strategy appears to center on fomenting a culture war in which it claims to be the party of “parental rights,” even as it blocks people from choosing abortion and determining if and when they become parents. Its legislative leaders have repeatedly blocked popular, common-sense initiatives like comprehensive paid family and extended medical leave, increased childcare access and credits, and expanded accessibility to health care.
Since Roe was overturned, various GOP politicians have rushed to announce proposals that are promoted as “pro-parent” or “pro-woman.” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life (SBA), a powerful anti-abortion group, even sent a memo to GOP lawmakers with talking points urging them to “demonstrate that the pro-life movement cares not only about the unborn child but about the mother as well.” (SBA spent big backing all of Trump’s extreme Supreme Court nominees who were hand-picked by Leo, and Leo’s network has contributed millions to SBA in recent years.)
One example of such posturing is the “earned leave” bill of Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida), which was reintroduced the same day that RoeIt was overturned. A “messaging” bill peddled by the Independent Women’s ForumIt is intended as a right-wing option to paid family or medical leave. It would penalize parents by allowing them to borrow Social Security money to care for their newborn child or adoptive child. force them to retire laterTake a lifelong cutThey can apply for their retirement benefits if they are unable or unwilling to pay the loan back sooner. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Rubio’s plan would even require the Social Security system to “claw back any leave benefits that haven’t been repaid from retirement checks — say because the beneficiary died before reaching retirement or before the full amount was repaid.”
Unlike IWF’s messaging bill, the progressive paid Family and Medical Leave proposal is not a loan and does not borrow from Social Security. It provides financial support to parents and children caring for their children.
Some of the dark money-funded anti-choice groups are also trying to rebrand “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are well known for spreading anti-abortion disinformation and otherwise pressuring those seeking abortions to continue the pregnancy, as “pregnancy help” centers.
Answering such calls, a coalition of anti-abortion groups — including the Leo-tied Students for Life, the Koch-funded Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Koch-funded Turning Point USA — will host a virtual event this month highlighting all of the “free services” pregnancy crisis centers offer, such as free ultrasounds (which are often used to pressure women out of abortions), “parenting programs” and “sexual risk avoidance education,” which is more widely known as abstinence-only education.
Notably, Senator Hawley introduced the “Pregnancy Resource Center Defense Act,” which would make it a felony crime to deface “pregnancy centers.” ADF and Erin Hawley promoted that bill. Senator Hawley, however, has not taken any steps towards holding accountable those who have defaced the Capitol. urinating and defecatingin its halls, causing millions of dollars in damage, and even used his fist pump to support the insurrectionists.
Bogus Claim #3: Dobbs Isn’t Part of a Broader Assault on Our Rights
Susan B. Anthony Pro-LifeAnd Students for LifeThey have tried to make abortion illegal across the country, and leaders of Students for LifeAnd Alliance Defending FreedomProtesters have tried to ban abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. But if that weren’t extreme enough, right-wing dark money agents are also trying to convince the public that the outrageously unpopular overturning of RoeThis is not the end of constitutional rights.
Heather Higgins, the Vicks VapoRub heiress and chair of IWF (a group launched to defend Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court as he was accused by Anita Hill and others of sexual harassment), has claimed that “the left is deliberately misrepresenting both what conservatives believe and what the Supreme Court said in the Dobbs decision,” as “it in no way affects the availability of safe contraceptives, which GOP voters nearly unanimously see as a good thing.”
Despite Higgins’s claims, the reality is that Justice Thomas made clear that destroying other constitutional rights was his objective. In his concurrence Dobbs, he argued that Sam Alito’s majority court decision to attack the “right to privacy” doctrine that undergirded RoeThis means that other constitutional rights such as gay marriage and contraception rights should be considered. Interracial marriage is protected from state bans by the right to privacy.
Higgins has also publicly attacked the Right to Contraception Act that would create federal protections for birth control, claiming that the bill is about “redefining contraception so broadly that it includes abortion and sterilization.” IWF, a documented pay-to-play group, has tried to position itself as pro-contraception because it has backed Big PhRma’s effort to make birth control pills available over the counter, even though its key leaders and fellows celebrated the Dobbs ruling.
Higgins’s talking point that access to contraceptives is not at risk based on this ruling has been echoed by other anti-abortion zealots, like Students for Life, even though they have attacked the availability of birth control pills and IUDs, taking the position that devices and pills that can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg are so-called “abortifacients.” (Notably, this issue came up in the hearings on Kavanaugh’s nomination, because he had accepted a litigant’s argument that the Affordable Care Act could not require businesses to provide employees with access to contraceptives that it believed to be abortifacients, which would limit constitutional protection for the most effective forms of birth control.) The overwhelming majority of Americans support preserving access to birth control pills, and devices such as IUDs.
Right-wing dark money organizations try to cover up the dangerous and very real consequences of overturning Roe, it is more important than ever to shine a light on their detrimental efforts to invalidate Americans’ concerns about abortion access and the likelihood that this is only the beginning of the right-wing efforts to turn back our rights.
Note: Ansev, a True North Research colleague, contributed to this article.
