MEPs demand answers over EU funding of anti-abortion charity

Members of the European Parliament have demanded answers over the European Union’s funding of an anti-abortion organisation.

Earlier this year, openDemocracy revealed the EU’s Erasmus+ programme had handed €1.2m to the World Youth Alliance (WYA), a US-based charity that promotes anti-abortion disinformation.

Now, politicians from Poland, Germany, Sweden and Slovakia have urged the European Commission to “commit to reviewing and potentially halting EU funding for organisations that oppose reproductive freedom”.

The WYA, which has an office in Brussels, is officially a “non-religious” non-governmental organisation. Yet, its values and teachings often echo religious conservative talking points on gender rights.

Our investigations found that the EU awarded the WYA more than €1m across numerous grants for the Erasmus+ scheme, which promotes youth education across the region, over the previous decade.

This included €400,000 to deliver ‘Women’s Health Goes Digital’, which aims to “design and deliver innovative training programmes in the field of women’s mental and reproductive health and rights”.

The charity won the grant to provide training on reproductive health and rights despite previously stating that “abortion is not part of reproductive health, and that in no case should abortion be promoted as part of family planning”.

The WYA has also insisted that “states must not bow to pressure to include abortion in reproductive health”.

Polish MEPs Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus and Krzysztof Śmiszek, Germany’s Maria Noichl, Slovakia’s Lucia Yar, and Sweden’s Hanna Gedin have written to the European Commission asking it to “clarify its position on the recent reports regarding €1.2m in EU funding for the WYA”.

The MEPs cited openDemocracy’s investigations and requested the Commission “support the public release of the training materials used in the Women’s Health Goes Digital project”.

The grant’s objectives include “several tangible outcomes” that may involve the WYA providing a “handbook with best practices, approaches and methodologies, a training programme containing step-by-step activities, digital platform, and two policy recommendations”.

The cross-country MEPs wrote to the Commission after expressing concerns over “reported risks of the WYA misleading young people” due to its history of “allegedly disseminating information on sexual and reproductive rights that is fundamentally at odds with EU values”.

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openDemocracySian Norris

The WYA has a long history of sharing medical disinformation about abortion, including claiming that the procedure is linked to infertility and issues in subsequent pregnancies. The NHS has confirmed that having an abortion “will not affect your chances of becoming pregnant and having normal pregnancies in the future”.

openDemocracy also revealed how WYA founder Anna Halpine compared abortion to the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide during an interview with a Catholic college.

Speaking to openDemocracy at the time of our investigation, Neil Datta, executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum of Sexual and Reproductive Rights, described the grant award as “mind-boggling”.

“That the European Commission is providing €400,000 to WYA for a reproductive health programme raises serious questions about the Commission’s professional capacity to understand what reproductive health is, which in turn calls into question all EU funding reported as reproductive health or sexual and reproductive health and rights,” he said.

The Commission previously told openDemocracy that it “is looking into the matter and will carry out, together with the National Agencies who selected the projects at stake, an analysis to assess whether there has been a breach of the grant agreement for non-compliance with EU values or serious professional misconduct."

As well as the European Union, WYA receives funding from US anti-abortion interests. In 2019, the Guardian reported that US charity The Chiaroscuro Foundation provided $1.7m over three years to assist WYA’s development of the FEMM Health period tracking app.

The associated FEMM Health Foundation is backed almost exclusively by Sean Fieler, a wealthy Catholic hedge funder who has long supported organisations that oppose birth control and abortion.