Louisiana Has No Idea What Anti-Abortion Centers Are Doing With State Funding

The state funneled $1.2 million into 12 crisis pregnancy centers in 2024 but hasn’t monitored how they’re using the money.

By Danielle Han | September 9, 2025 | 5:14pm

Photo: iStockphoto Abortion Politics

Louisiana Has No Idea What Anti-Abortion Centers Are Doing With State Funding

In his mission to make Louisiana the worst-ever U.S. state to live in (an accolade it’s won for the last two years in a row), GOP Governor Jeff Landry not only enacted one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, but has also funneled public funds into anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). Even worse, he’s not keeping track of who is getting how much and what they’re using it for. Yes, Jeff, that ought to fix your state’s liveability problem!

CPCs are better known as the fake clinics that bully pregnant people with misinformation and shoddy science, and are run by religious anti-abortion groups and bankrolled by super-dodgy politics. On September 3, a legislative auditor released a report revealing that the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) hasn’t been monitoring the $1.2 million that went to 12 CPCs in August 2024.

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The filing, which was published by the Louisiana Illuminator on Tuesday, said this means the funds “could have paid pregnancy centers for services ineligible for funding under state law.” For example, of those 12 CPCs, at least five offered some sort of “abortion pill reversal” service, which, uh, does not exist. The outlet also reported that Landry’s office plans to continue funding CPCs and has raised its annual spending cap per center in the latest budget cycle. Jezebel reached out to Landry’s office, but they declined to comment.

“In a state like Louisiana, where legitimate resources for pregnant people are difficult to access or completely inaccessible, sending it to these crisis pregnancy centers is unconscionable,” Michele Erenberg, the executive director of Lift Louisiana, told Jezebel. Her organization, she explains, is fighting a lonely battle in the state–and is also one of the only organizations to launch “any sort of investigation or public pushback on these unlicensed pregnancy centers.”

In 2024, Louisiana passed SB 278 (dubiously called the “Pregnancy and Baby Care Initiative”), which stipulates that designated state funding is only meant for “counseling, mentoring, classes and material items such as cribs or diapers,” according to the Illuminator, and requires the DCFS to work with an umbrella nonprofit organization to distribute the public money into CPCs. But without that nonprofit acting as a middleman, the auditor’s report was unable to discern how exactly the $1.2 million was spent.

CPCs are a growing collection of predatory pests in post-Roe America, and have received concerning amounts of public funding since 2022. According to a ProPublica report, Missouri leads the U.S. in its per-capita investment in CPCs, and, in 2024, Texas was revealed to be sending around $140 million to its anti-abortion centers (an amount that ballooned from $5 million in 2005). The Illuminator also noted that, as of June, there were 38 CPCs in Louisiana, meaning most of those centers did not receive state funds this round.

“I’m not super optimistic that we’re going to see an immediate decrease in this funding,” Erenberg concluded. “I think that the most important thing is that…the legislators move to have more transparency, more oversight, more accountability.”

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