Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation directing $2 million to pregnancy centers, maternity centers, and adoption agencies helping mothers reject abortion.
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (LifeSiteNews) -- Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed legislation directing $2 million to a variety of organizations dedicated to encouraging mothers in difficult pregnancies to choose life.
HB 1202 establishes grants for entities that offer nutritional information and counseling, nutritional service referrals, prenatal vitamins, information about prenatal care options, and material, social, or emotional support. Eligible types of facilities include pregnancy centers, maternity homes, adoption agencies, and other charities. Organizations involved in abortion are not eligible.
“Since 2022 Family Council has worked with the Arkansas Legislature and the governor to secure funding every year for pregnancy resource centers. These state-funded grants have helped support dozens of charities that assist women and children in Arkansas,” said Arkansas Family Council. “Pro-lifers in Arkansas have worked hard to prohibit abortion. We need to work to make abortion irrelevant and unthinkable as well. Supporting pregnancy resource centers is one way we can do that.”
Crisis pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
The abortion movement is notoriously hostile to such alternatives to abortion, using efforts such as publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers, attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors, and violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
Abortion is illegal throughout pregnancy in Arkansas except when deemed “necessary to preserve the life of a pregnant woman whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury.” Abortion, the destruction of an innocent unborn child, is never necessary to protect the mother's health, nor is it ever justifiable.
As governor, Sanders has taken multiple pro-life actions on top of the state's abortion ban, such as distributing additional money to pregnancy centers, signing a law making it a crime to give a pregnant woman abortion drugs without her knowledge or consent, and ordering state flags lowered to commemorate Roe v. Wade’s victims.
