The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is facing a new scandal after it was revealed that its official anti-poverty program, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), has granted 355,000 dollars to the Ostara Initiative, an organization that—according to documentation published by the Lepanto Institute—openly promotes access to abortion among incarcerated women.
Since 2019, the CCHD has funded Ostara on six occasions, despite the program’s own rules prohibiting grants to entities that contradict Catholic moral doctrine, especially on issues such as abortion, contraception, or gender ideology.
A “pro-abortion” initiative with Catholic funds
The report from the Lepanto Institute presents public statements from Ostara’s executives, in which they defend abortion as a “constitutional right”.
In 2018, Erica Gerrity, co-founder and executive director, acknowledged that the Minnesota Prison Doula Project—one of Ostara’s branches—“worked to support incarcerated women seeking access to reproductive care, including abortion”.
That same year, Rebecca Shlafer, the organization’s research director, stated in an interview:
“We are treating people like trash and not giving them access to terminate their pregnancy when they want to.”
In 2022, the same leaders—along with other Ostara collaborators—signed the article Justice for Incarcerated Moms Act of 2021, where they denounced that “pregnant people in prison have been deprived of their constitutional right to abortion”.
Serious accusation against the US episcopate
For Michael Hichborn, president of the Lepanto Institute, the fact that an entity dependent on the bishops repeatedly funds an openly pro-abortion organization constitutes a frontal violation of the Catholic magisterium:
“It is completely incomprehensible that the bishops of the United States are funding this organization. We have provided them with solid evidence since 2020, and they have not even responded to this flagrant contradiction with Catholic doctrine.”
Hichborn added that this case demonstrates that the CCHD “lacks integrity” and “violates its own policies,” going so far as to describe the situation as a moral scandal:
“The bishops claim that the CCHD never funds groups that promote abortion, but the facts demonstrate otherwise. The only solution is to permanently close this program.”
A recurring controversy
This is not the first time that the CCHD—created in 1969 as the USCCB’s social action program—has been involved in controversies for allocating funds to organizations contrary to Catholic doctrine.
In recent years, the Lepanto Institute has documented numerous cases of funding to entities that support pro-abortion policies or gender ideology under the pretext of “fight against poverty”.
Despite the repeated reports and denunciations, the USCCB has not issued any official statement to date regarding the grants awarded to Ostara nor has it announced a review of the program.