NC directs more than $10.7M to crisis pregnancy centers

By Rachel Crumpler

The North Carolina state budget passed in July allocates more than $10.7 million to pregnancy resource centers, also known as crisis pregnancy centers, continuing a pattern of state funding that has grown substantially over the past decade.

About 100 of these centers — generally nonprofit, Christian-led organizations — operate across the state and primarily serve women who have unintended pregnancies. Most offer free pregnancy tests and, increasingly, ultrasounds. Some also provide parenting resources, such as educational classes and maternity and baby supplies. 

They encourage women to continue their pregnancies by promoting parenting and adoption; they do not perform or refer clients for abortion services. The centers are part of an anti-abortion movement to reduce the number of abortions in North Carolina and nationwide.

“We offer compassionate support and love to anyone facing an unexpected pregnancy or wishing to prepare for childbirth and/or improve their parenting skills through the life-changing Good News of Jesus Christ,” reads the website of M.Y. Life Center, a pregnancy center in Burnsville. It serves Mitchell and Yancey counties and received $200,000 in the state budget — one of the highest directed appropriations for such centers.

North Carolina’s funding of crisis pregnancy centers is part of a broader nationwide trend in which many Republican-led states have increasingly provided taxpayer dollars to the centers, particularly since the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Critics say if lawmakers’ goal is to support maternal and children’s health, the money could be better spent elsewhere. 

Ballooning state appropriations

Twenty-one states allocated nearly a half-billion dollars, or $491 million, of taxpayer money to crisis pregnancy center organizations between fiscal years 2022 and 2025, according to a States Newsroom 50-state investigation into federal and state budgets. The news organization found that while public funding is growing, oversight has not kept pace.

That’s the case in North Carolina, where funding has swelled over the past decade. The state budget allocated $300,000 to these facilities in fiscal year 2016, and their allocation hit a high of more than $12 million in fiscal year 2024. Although the most recent budget’s allotment is slightly smaller, funding for the centers is still substantially higher than in earlier budget cycles.

“Pregnancy centers help fill the gap between medical care and the practical day-to-day support many women and families need,” Beverly Weeks, CEO of Wayne Pregnancy Center in Goldsboro, said in a statement to NC Health News. The center has received state funding. “We are not trying to replace hospitals, physicians, or public health programs; we complement them. Our goal is to remove practical barriers that can make an unexpected pregnancy feel overwhelming and to continue supporting women and families beyond the pregnancy itself.”

Many reproductive health providers find the state’s funding of these facilities frustrating. 

“I think this is a real misguided use of state funds and taxpayer dollars,” said Amy Bryant, an OB-GYN in the Triangle who also provides abortions. “We need to be funding maternity care. We need to be supporting people who are pregnant in much less ideologically driven and more comprehensive ways.”

A spokesperson for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement to NC Health News that the department has neither recommended nor requested funding for crisis pregnancy centers as part of its maternal and infant health programs and services.

Serving ‘abortion-minded’ women 

The first crisis pregnancy center in the United States — Pearson Place — opened in Hawaii in 1967. The centers have since spread across the country, with an estimated 2,559 operating across all 50 states as of March 31, 2026, according to data collected by researchers at the University of Georgia.

North Carolina has the seventh-highest number of crisis pregnancy centers in the nation, according to the same research. New centers continue to open, including Heart’s Hope, a crisis pregnancy center in Duplin County that opened its doors in May.

“If I had a place like this available to me back then, maybe I wouldn’t have made some of the bad decisions I did at the time — maybe I wouldn’t have had that first abortion,” founder Lorrie Kennedy told the Duplin Journal about her motivation for opening the center. “Who knows how different my life would have been.”

The centers position themselves to reach women considering abortion, with the goal of encouraging them to continue their pregnancies and choose parenting or adoption.

Mountain Area Pregnancy Services, which changed its public-facing name to Ascend Women’s Center in 2024, has received state funding for years. In the most recent state budget, the center received a direct appropriation of $50,000.

“Once the funds are released, we will work with the state to develop an approved spending plan that meets all applicable guidelines and helps us better serve the more than 450 clients who seek our support each year,” Executive Director Kristi Brown said in a statement to NC Health News.

Brown said Ascend Women’s Center provides no-cost pregnancy testing, limited obstetric ultrasounds, STI testing, pregnancy options education, referrals, parenting and life-skills classes and grief support. 

Ascend Women’s Center’s two locations in Asheville and Waynesville served 455 unique clients and provided 484 ultrasounds, according to the organization’s 2025 impact report. Fifty-one women “at risk for abortion chose life,” and 50 people participated in parenting classes.

Wayne Pregnancy Center, which has operated for 25 years in Goldsboro, is one of the state’s highest volume pregnancy centers, according to a state report. Weeks said the center served more than 1,000 clients in 2025, providing more than 500 ultrasounds. 

Some clients may come once for a particular service, while others develop longer relationships with the center, Weeks said — returning for education, material assistance, referrals and continued support throughout pregnancy and after their babies are born.

“We want to walk alongside families beyond that initial appointment and help address practical needs that can make pregnancy and parenting overwhelming,” Weeks said in a statement. “For us, it’s not simply about helping a woman through pregnancy; it’s about helping her and her family move forward toward stability, hope, and a healthier future.”

For example, Weeks said the pregnancy center started another arm of its work — Cry Freedom Missions — in 2019 to provide assistance and safe housing to survivors of sex trafficking, after staff noticed signs of trafficking among some women who came in for free pregnancy tests. Weeks said the $160,000 allocated to Wayne Pregnancy Center in the state budget will go toward this work.

Health providers raise concerns

While crisis pregnancy centers often appear in internet searches for reproductive health clinics or abortion clinics, they will not refer clients for abortions. They are not licensed health centers and do not offer prenatal care during the course of a pregnancy. 

Some studies have found that crisis pregnancy centers give inaccurate medical information about the risks of abortion. The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists warned in an issue brief that crisis pregnancy centers endanger public health by spreading medical misinformation such as assertions that abortions lead to multiple complications, or that there are links between them and breast cancer or infertility. The ACOG brief also expressed concern that attendance at a crisis pregnancy center can delay access to legitimate health care, pushing women past the term limits on abortion set in state laws.

“CPCs generally remain unregulated and unchecked, leaving pregnant people susceptible to coercive practices and disinformation,” the brief reads. “As abortion access diminishes across the country, the harm caused by CPCs is increasingly magnified.”

Jonas Swartz, an OB-GYN at Duke who also provides abortions, has researched crisis pregnancy centers and co-wrote a paper calling their practices “legal but unethical.”

“When patients come, they often believe that they went to a health clinic, but crisis pregnancy centers are non-medical clinics,” Swartz said, describing some of the confusion he sees from patients who have gone to these centers before seeking care from him. “They are not licensed clinics. They don’t have the same types of standards and supervision that people would get had they gone to a legitimate medical clinic, and so I think people are exposed to misinformation.”

North Carolina’s stricter abortion law, which took effect in July 2023, shortened the window for most abortions from 20 to 12 weeks, meaning delays in care can affect whether someone remains within the state’s legal limit.

Bryant said her patients who have gone to crisis pregnancy centers have had a range of experiences.

“Some people go and actually think that it is an abortion clinic and they’re going to be able to get an abortion, and then they find out that they can’t,” Bryant said. “I’ve had other patients complain that they went in there just because they needed a quick ultrasound to find out where they were in the pregnancy and they wasted a lot of their time by keeping them there in the center and trying to talk them through the purported harms of abortion. I’ve also had patients bring me ultrasounds that they got at these places that have no medically relevant information on them, like say the gestational age of the pregnancy, but will say very clearly in big words, ‘Baby.’”

Millions in funding

A majority of North Carolina’s crisis pregnancy centers have received state funding through the Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship, also known as LifeLink Carolina. Established in 1987 by a small group of pregnancy center directors to coordinate training and unity among the state’s centers, the organization has grown from a small nonprofit supported by dues and private donors into a recipient of millions in state funding.

Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship received $6 million in recurring funding in the state budget, which it distributes through grants to the state’s crisis pregnancy centers. The grants can be used to cover expenses for medical equipment, training and services. Just over $1 million is designated for its Circle of Care Program, which launched in 2023 to mentor pregnant and early parenting mothers by helping them learn skills and work toward financial stability. 

LifeLink Carolina did not respond to NC Health News’ interview requests about the funding. NC Health News emailed and called the number listed on the website multiple times, but calls went straight to a voicemail that does not allow messages. Calls, a voicemail and text message to State Director Bobbie Meyer also went unanswered. 

Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship is required to submit a report providing an overview of its funding allocations by July 1 of each odd-numbered year. The latest report submitted to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Health and Human Services shows wide variation in the number of new clients served by centers receiving funding.

For example, Uwharrie Women’s Center in Troy received $61,059.96 in state grant funding through the Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2025 and reported serving nine new clients in 2024 and 31 during the first half of 2025. 

Other pregnancy centers reported serving hundreds of new clients. A handful reported serving more than 1,000 new clients annually, such as Queen City Pregnancy Resource Center in Charlotte and Hand of Hope Pregnancy Centers, which has locations in Fuquay-Varina, Raleigh and Fayetteville.

As of June 30, 2025, 1,795 women across the state had been “assisted extensively” through Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship’s Circle of Care Program, which allows pregnancy center staff to use grant funding to pay for client car repairs, help secure safe housing and purchase medicine, according to a report provided to lawmakers.

Another major chunk of state funding — nearly $3.3 million — has been allocated to the Human Coalition, a Texas-based pro-life organization whose vision is to “make abortion unthinkable and unnecessary,” to operate its Continuum of Care Program in North Carolina. The program provides social services case management, referrals and support to “biological parents of unborn children and biological or adoptive parents of children under the age of 2” aimed at filling in medical, social service and resource gaps. 

The Texas organization reported total revenues of $32.2 million in 2024, with $1.9 million in executive compensation. 

The program’s work in North Carolina began as a pilot in Raleigh to support women with unexpected pregnancies and was initially funded in the 2017 state budget, which appropriated $300,000 in nonrecurring funds for each year of the two-year budget. The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services submitted a report to lawmakers on April 30, 2019, stating that it could not make an informed recommendation about expansion of the Human Coalition Continuum of Care program. 

State funding for the program increased anyway, reaching $3.2 million per year through the 2021 state budget, which extended the program to a second pregnancy care center in Charlotte. In addition to in-person visits at the two locations, Human Coalition contacts clients by phone or text message and can refer them to other centers.

From July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2025, the Human Coalition reported using $3 million in state funding to serve 3,963 clients across 45 counties, including 33,278 pregnancy counseling sessions, 4,906 parenting counseling sessions and 2,449 adoption counseling sessions, according to a July report the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services submitted to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Health and Human Services. Nearly $2.5 million went toward personnel, according to the report. 

Efforts to redirect funding

Rep. Julie von Haefen (D-Raleigh) is a critic of state funding for crisis pregnancy centers. She has filed three bills since she took office in 2019 seeking greater oversight of the centers and reductions in their funding. 

Most recently, she filed a bill in April that sought to add reporting requirements for centers receiving any state funding, including the number of staff and volunteers, whether they include health care professionals, the number of patients served and services provided, and the amount of material support provided to clients.

The bill would also have redirected $6.75 million from the Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship to evidence-based maternal and infant health programs administered by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, such as Healthy Beginnings, Safe Sleep NC and the Nurse-Family Partnership.

Von Haefen said pregnancy centers have little oversight, and she does not view the funding as a cost-effective approach to improving maternal and infant health outcomes.

The bill did not advance, and von Haefen said she was disappointed to see funding for these centers continue in the latest budget, particularly as funding for the Nurse-Family Partnership, an evidence-based home visiting program to support at-risk mothers and their infants, lost its state funding despite data showing its effectiveness.

“I am not advocating for these places to be shuttered,” von Haefen told NC Health News about her advocacy. “That’s not my role as a legislator. They’re nonprofit organizations that have every right to do what they’re gonna do. But, for me, I don’t feel like our taxpayer money should be going to support them when they’re not proving that they’re using it in a way that’s giving us any results.”

Weeks, from Wayne Pregnancy Center, defended funding for pregnancy centers in a statement to NC Health News and invited “anyone who questions the value of this work to come see it firsthand, meet the women, see the services being provided, and look at the lives behind the numbers.”

“Pregnancy care centers don’t replace physicians or hospitals, and we don’t claim to, but we do stand in a very real gap,” Weeks said. “When a woman walks through our doors, scared, overwhelmed, or unsure where to turn, our first question isn’t, ‘What do you believe?’ or ‘How will you vote?’ It’s simply, ‘How can we help you?’” 

DHHS has not recommended funding for crisis pregnancy centers, and a department spokesperson said in a statement to NC Health News that “the department has no regulatory oversight or authority over the activities or outcomes of the centers.” The General Assembly exercises full discretion over the entities that continue to receive funding and any related monitoring, DHHS said.

Demi Dowdy, a spokesperson for House Speaker Destin Hall (R-Caldwell), said in a statement to NC Health News that Hall is proud to support funding for pregnancy resource centers, which she said provide “critical support to North Carolina women in crisis.” She noted centers that received state funding served more than 21,000 new clients in 2024 alone, according to a report submitted to lawmakers last year.

“With our support, we hope these centers continue to serve thousands more North Carolina women and families for years to come,” Dowdy said.

The office of Senate leader Phil Berger (R-Eden) did not respond to a request for comment.

Von Haefen said she thinks there’s some common ground that can be found at the legislature.

“If you take abortion out of the conversation or you take reproductive rights out of the conversation, it seems like we would have common ground because I think that they [the Republican majority] would want to see more transparency, more oversight over the money that they’re appropriating,” von Haefen said. 

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