At the California ProLife Legislative Banquet last week, Assemblywoman Shannon Grove brought a bible to the podium.

“This is the infallible word of God,” Grove said, holding the Bible above her head as attendees clapped. “I fear Him more than I fear anyone.”

Grove was speaking to a roomful of advocates, activists, and clergy who had gathered at the Grand Hotel in Sacramento to celebrate the (relatively few) California legislators who oppose abortion. Many of the state’s anti-choice groups were in attendance, including Catholic Bishops for Life, Pray California, Californians for Life, and the California Republican Assembly. In addition to Assemblywoman Grove, state Sens. Mike Morrell and Joel Anderson spoke.

The California ProLife Council is the California affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, one of the most powerful anti-choice groups in the country. National Right to Life has received funding from top conservative donors, including nearly $5 million from Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, and more than $200,000 from the Koch-affiliated Donors Trust. On the national stage, the California ProLife Council, nestled in a deep-blue state, doesn’t command much money or attention. The group reported just a little over $100,000 in total revenue for 2013, according to its federal tax filings. Because it is a nonprofit, it is not required to disclose its donors.

Assemblywoman Grove was the final elected official to speak, and she was full of fire. A charismatic speaker who represents the majority of Kern County in the Central Valley, Grove has enjoyed support from some of the most prominent Republicans in the country, including Rick Perry and Mike Huckabee. But she had come to talk about an even more powerful figure.

“Texas was in a long period of drought until Governor Perry signed the fetal pain bill,” she told the audience, presumably referring to HB 2, the omnibus Texas abortion bill that included a 20-week ban based on junk science. “It rained that night. Now God has His hold on California.”

The assemblywoman did not respond to Rewire’s request for further comment.

California is currently in its fourth year of unprecedented drought. In April of this year, Gov. Jerry Brown imposed mandatory water restrictions on the state, requiring all cities and towns to cut their water use by 25 percent. The state has only about one year of water left in its reservoirs. January was the driest month in California’s history since record-keeping began in 1895.

Across the country writers, activists, and policymakers have weighed in on the true cause of California’s exceptional drought. Some say we should beware the menace of almonds. Others point to the arrogance of green lawns blooming in the desert. Regardless of what anyone says, it’s quite clear that California is facing a water crisis.

Assemblywoman Grove knows the facts of this crisis intimately, because she serves on the Agriculture Committee in the California State Assembly. The committee is in charge of legislation related to growing crops, regulating pesticides, and raising cattle and poultry in California. Water is a key issue for Grove’s constituents, and central to her work in the legislature. Grove’s background is not in agriculture, though she was born and raised in Kern County, the area of California that she now represents. After graduating from high school, she joined the Army and served overseas in Germany. In 1993 she co-founded Continental Labor and Staffing Resources, a company of which she is now the CEO.

In her time as an assembly member, Grove has come up with a variety of explanations, both political and divine, for the drought. In September 2014, she wrote an op-ed in the Bakersfield Californian, calling on the federal government to temporarily suspend the Endangered Species Act as it applies to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. She argued that this would free up water for irrigation that is currently used to protect endangered fish.

“Political leaders refuse to face the problem with the seriousness it deserves,” she wrote, although the Congressional Research Office specifically addressed this proposal in a 2009 report, concluding that federal and state regulations have a much lower impact on water resources than lack of runoff (i.e. drought itself). In other words, endangered fish aren’t really the problem. Still five years later, Grove asked Breitbart, “What civilized society destroys its own food source for a three-inch fish?”

But last week, Grove stressed that God, even more than problematic federal policy, has caused California’s drought.

Brian Johnston, the chairman of the California ProLife Council, spoke with Rewire by phone about Grove’s comments at the legislative banquet hosted by his organization.

“That was never said by me or the California ProLife Council,” he said, referring to Grove’s claims about God’s parched-earth strategies.

Grove is not alone in her belief about why the reservoirs are drying up in California. Earlier this year, Bill Koenig, the conservative editor of World Watch Daily, also linked California’s drought to the state’s acceptance of same-sex marriage and abortion.

“We’ve got a state that over and over again will go against the word of God, that will continually take positions on marriage and abortion and on a lot of things that are just completely opposed to the scriptures… So there very likely could be a drought component to this judgment,” Koenig told Understanding The Times.

There’s a long history of religious and political leaders attributing catastrophic events to divine retribution, particularly over the issue of abortion. Soon after Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,833 people, evangelical preacher Pat Robertson said that the hurricane was God’s punishment for abortion. (Robertson later blamed Haiti’s earthquake on the Haitian people’s “pact to the devil.”) Steve Lefamine, the director of Columbia Christians for Life in South Carolina, agreed with Robertson about the causes of Hurricane Katrina. He told the Washington Post that when he viewed the full-color satellite map of the hurricane, he saw an 8-week-old fetus in the image.

“In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion,” Lefamine told the Washington Post.

Assemblywoman Grove has been an uncompromising advocate for anti-choice legislation since she was elected to the California State Assembly in November 2010. In 2014, she introduced a ban on sex-selective abortion, with a fine of up to $10,000 on doctors who performed such a procedure (it died in committee). Earlier this year, she introduced a bill allowing insurance companies to exclude abortion coverage for any reason, without penalty. It too, failed to pass committee.

In general, anti-choice activists and politicians in liberal California fight an uphill battle, considering that California is one of the only states where the legislature has passed bills actually aimed at expanding reproductive freedom in recent years. California currently doesn’t have any of the major restrictions on abortion that have been imposed in other states, such as waiting periods, mandated parental involvement, or limitations on public funds for abortions.

Last month, the California Assembly passed a bill that would even regulate crisis pregnancy centers, requiring them to provide women with information about all their reproductive options, including abortion. Grove expressed opposition to the bill in her speech.

“The last time the government made people carry a government message, it was World War II and they made people wear Jewish stars,” Grove said.

When Grove was finished, she left the stage to a standing ovation.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) justified her recent subpoenas of a prominent later abortion provider and first responders in the community where he works by pointing to “public reports” that people who sought abortion care from the doctor required hospital transfers.

Hospital transfers are not necessarily a cause for alarm, multiple sources told Rewire. In fact, the rare instances signal a continued commitment to appropriate patient care that begins in an abortion clinic. A patient may not require further treatment upon arrival at the hospital, indicating a proactive clinic rather than a dangerous one. Regardless of the circumstances, anti-choice activists often hijack so-called emergencies to fuel their coverage of the alleged dangers of abortion care.

Freestanding clinics manage most immediate abortion-related complications, including those that occur during later abortions, said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a provider and professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive services at the University of California, San Francisco.

Abortion-related complications are rare throughout all stages of pregnancy. The even rarer event that such complications necessitate a hospital transfer doesn’t indicate the work of a bad abortion provider, Grossman explained in an interview with Rewire.

“There are sometimes things that happen that are unforeseeable,” he said.

Evidence Contradicts Blackburn Subpoena Claims

Grossman, his University of California, San Francisco colleague Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, and other reproductive health care practitioners and policy experts studied just how often those unforeseeable instances occur in a review of nearly 55,000 abortions covered under the fee-for-service California Medicaid program from 2009-2010. The state data allowed researchers to track subsequent follow-up care sought after an abortion.

Among all abortions, about one of 5,491, or 0.03 percent, involved ambulance transfers to emergency departments on the day of the procedure, the researchers found.

For procedures in the second trimester or later, major complications that required hospital admissions, blood transfusions, or surgery amounted to 34 cases, or 0.41 percent.

Many hospitals don’t provide abortions, which essentially forces providers to perform the procedure at a freestanding clinic or turn away patients, Grossman said. Providers would not do something unsafe, he stressed, “but that puts a lot of pressure on them because they don’t have that option of deciding to do the procedure of a higher-risk patient in a hospital.”

States that have enacted targeted regulations of abortion providers, known as TRAP laws, may force providers to gain hospital admitting privileges, even though hospitals can’t refuse to care for transfers and emergency arrivals. Many hospitals don’t want to issue admitting privileges to abortion providers, Grossman said, in part because their patient admissions are so infrequent—putting the onus back on clinics to provide abortion care.

Data supports Grossman’s assessment about abortion and clinic safety. Abortion care is one of the safest medical procedures performed in the United States, according to Planned Parenthood and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “The rate of complications increases as a woman’s pregnancy continues, but these complications remain very unlikely,” the groups said in a joint fact sheet.

Blackburn, the chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, framed such instances differently when she shifted the panel’s focus from fetal tissue research practices to later abortion care, issuing subpoenas in mid-May to Dr. LeRoy Carhart and various local and state entities in Maryland.

“Public reports indicate at least five women have been sent to the hospital since December while seeking an abortion in this clinic,” Blackburn said in a press release. Blackburn expressed concern for “the sake of the women who have been rushed from that clinic to the hospital with increasing frequency.”

Blackburn Allegations Rooted in Dubious Sources

Blackburn’s press release cited the five hospital transfers since December 2015, but her subpoenas demand documentation dating back to 2010—signaling a deeper scope to her investigation.

The National Abortion Federation (NAF), the professional association of abortion providers, countered Blackburn’s basis for the subpoenas.

“Abortion opponents have been targeting Dr. Carhart for years because he is a very vocal and visible abortion provider,” NAF spokesperson Melissa Fowler told Rewire in an email. Following the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller, Carhart arguably became the country’s most prominent provider of later abortion care.

The Maryland Board of Physicians, one of the targets of Blackburn’s subpoenas, indicates that Carhart is in good standing. The board’s online practitioner profile system lists no Maryland disciplinary actions, no pending charges, and no reported malpractice judgments and arbitration awards within the past ten years. Malpractice settlements are another measure of provider competence, and Carhart hasn’t had three or more malpractice settlements of at least $150,000 in the past five years, according to the system. Additionally, the courts have not reported “convictions for any crime involving moral turpitude,” which the board defines as “conduct evidencing moral baseness” and determines on an individual basis under common law.  

Absent allegations on the board’s website, the “public reports” smearing Carhart appear to come from anti-choice news outlets. In March, LifeSiteNews.com cited eyewitness accounts from anti-choice activists in reporting that Carhart sent a fourth woman to the hospital in four months. A leader of the radical anti-choice group Operation Rescue covered the same allegations for LifeNews.com.

The same website in 2013 alleged that the Washington Post downplayed the death of a young woman who sought a later abortion at the clinic. However, the Maryland medical examiner’s office found that the woman died of natural causes from a rare complication that can also occur in conjunction with childbirth, and state health officials found “no deficiencies” in the care she received at the clinic. Blackburn’s subpoenas include Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center, formerly Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, where the woman died.

Anti-choice organizations and their reports have played a prominent role in the current congressional inquiry. Troy Newman, Operation Rescue’s president, and David Daleiden founded the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the anti-choice front group that triggered the select panel’s investigation into allegations that Planned Parenthood profited from fetal tissue donations obtained from abortions.

Blackburn referenced CMP’s heavily edited videos in her threat “to pursue all means necessary” to obtain documents from StemExpress, the tissue procurement company that worked with Planned Parenthood. The GOP’s exhibits at the panel’s April hearing on fetal tissue “pricing” reportedly duplicated or nearly duplicated the “evidence” in the CMP attack videos.

Blackburn’s select panel spokesperson denied that the subpoenas are based on information from anti-choice sources.

“The subpoenas we issued are not based on the sources you have cited,” the spokesperson told Rewire in an email. “However, due to confidentiality agreements, we are not at liberty to disclose the identities of our sources.”

Anti-Choice Activists Hijack Emergencies

Although Blackburn’s evidence may come from different sources, the fact remains that Operation Rescue and other radical anti-choice activists are known for surveilling abortion clinics and making repeated records requests, all to report similar claims about botched abortions necessitating hospital transfers.

duVergne Gaines, director of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Clinic Access Project, said surveillance tactics enable anti-choice activists not only to photograph and video emergency responders, but also follow up with Freedom of Information Act and equivalent state-level requests for records, including 9-1-1 tapes, if state laws permit their release.

“They collect data,” Gaines said in an interview. “They put that up on the websites themselves, on their own Facebook pages, and have no real knowledge about what or why an ambulance may have been contacted.”

Hospital transfers in some instances have nothing to do with the procedure. Contrary to initial anti-choice accounts, the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal Star reported that a woman transferred in 2015 from a local Planned Parenthood to a hospital “wasn’t suffering complications from an abortion, but had instead sought help at the clinic after being assaulted at her home nearby.”

At times, anti-choice activists may manufacture emergency scenarios, Gaines said. “The most obvious example is alleging that a minor is inside being forced to undergo a procedure against her will, and that can happen if they see a minor go in [to a clinic],” she said.

Rewire reported in March that police appeared at a Mississippi clinic and threatened to charge a single mother with fetal homicide after her daughter, a minor seeking a legal abortion, signed a bogus Life Dynamics document stating that she was being coerced into the procedure.

The prominent anti-choice group uses the document to deceive and intimidate patients and providers by threatening legal action should they go through with obtaining or providing abortion care.

NAF President Vicki Saporta said that many of her group’s members have experienced anti-choice tactics such as staking out clinics for emergency vehicles, placing calls to summon emergency responders, and trailing ambulances to hospitals with the aim of gathering confidential patient information. Preferred tactics depend on the local anti-choice community, she said.

Saporta pointed to a crisis pregnancy center that opened in the same complex as the Germantown, Maryland, clinic where Carhart practices. A Germantown Pregnancy Choices, which comes up as the Maryland Coalition for Life when entered into Google Maps, operates within less than 200 feet of the clinic. The Maryland Coalition for Life cited eyewitness accounts and a video in March to support allegations that an underage girl required a hospital transfer “due to medical emergencies related to a late term abortion.”

Anti-choice activists targeting clinics over safety share a common denominator. “Once their bogus claims are investigated, for the most part, no action is taken because nothing is actionable,” Saporta said.

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are billed as alternatives to abortion clinics, but new data suggests they largely fail at their mission, persuading less than 4 percent of clients to forgo abortion care.

Of the 2.6 million clients who visited crisis pregnancy centers since 2004, 3.52 percent, or 92,679 people, decided against having an abortion. The statistics come from eKYROS.com, Inc., an anti-choice, Texas-based software company, which says more than 1,200 CPCs use its software to track clients and measure results.

The publicly available data, as the eKYROS website explains, reflects “clients who came to the center with initial intentions of Abortion or Undecided and then changed their mind to carry baby to term.”

The eKYROS software allows CPCs to collect demographic information on clients and categorize them based on a variety of criteria, including whether they are “abortion minded,” “abortion vulnerable,” or “likely to carry“—categories described in a software demo posted online. These categories are key to assessing whether the facilities are achieving what is at the heart of CPCs’ mission: convincing pregnant people to “choose life,” a viewpoint reflecting the largely evangelical Christian ideals of the centers’ religious operators.

“We can change the culture one woman at a time,” Kathleen Eaton Bravo, founder of a growing chain of California-based CPCs called Obria Medical Clinics, told the National Catholic Register last year. “We need them to develop a relationship with us, rather than Planned Parenthood.”

These “relationships” are key to the ability of CPCs to show their worth to religious backers. The centers showcase their “success stories,” or “lives saved,” in annual reports, fundraising campaigns, and promotional materials.

Meanwhile, Republican-held legislatures are funneling millions to these anti-choice facilities, buoyed by “success stories,” which statistics suggest are few and far between.

One of these “success stories” is Evelin, a 26-year-old who says she was jobless, going to school, and sleeping on her mother’s couch when she learned of her pregnancy. Recounting her story in a video produced by the CPC Los Angeles Pregnancy Services, Evelin describes how the center’s staff persuaded her to remain pregnant by showing her “how big” her “baby” was and by giving her a baby book.

Evelin’s story is one of a handful that Los Angeles Pregnancy Services promotes online.

eKYROS also emphasizes results, noting in an online demo: “In this ministry there are always tough questions that need to be asked: Is this particular part of our ministry making a difference?” CPCs are nonprofits, primarily funded by religious groups, individual donors, churches, and increasingly by public dollars.

But statistics reported by eKYROS suggest that CPCs overwhelmingly fail to reach or persuade their target audience of people seeking to end a pregnancy, despite outnumbering abortion clinics. At least 22 states furnish some form of public funding to CPCs, as Republican-majority legislatures cut financial support for Planned Parenthood.

CPCs are often tied to national anti-choice umbrella groups, such as Heartbeat International, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, and Care Net, which alone numbers 1,100 affiliates. An eKYROS demo posted online indicates that some Care Net-affiliated CPCs use the software to report to the national office, although it’s not clear how many.

eKYROS and Care Net did not respond to multiple information requests, including a query about an apparent mismatch between figures reported by Care Net and eKYROS.

Care Net in its most recent annual report said it “saved” 73,000 lives in 2014. eKYROS, however, reported 3,476 births in 2014 from “clients who came to the center with initial intentions of Abortion or Undecided and then changed their mind to carry baby to term and the pregnancy outcome was confirmed as a birth by the center.”

Anti-choice groups typically equate preventing abortions to “saving lives,” so the basis for the 69,524 “lives” discrepancy is unclear.

Kimberly Kelly, who has studied CPCs for a decade and is associate professor of sociology and director of gender studies at Mississippi State University, told Rewire in an interview that the centers frequently count both the pregnant person and the fetus as “saved lives,” essentially double counting.

The tactics employed by CPCs to attract pregnant clients are legion and growing.

CPCs have for years masqueraded as reproductive health clinics, offering free pregnancy tests and sonograms to draw in pregnant people. Some facilities go as far as setting up shop in closed abortion clinics—a ruse to mislead former clients of the clinics. Oftentimes, the anti-choice activists staged outside of abortion clinics have ties to CPCs. Their aim is to divert patients seeking abortion care with promises of free health care, housing, and financial support at CPCs.

Federal and independent investigations have caught CPC staff lying about the so-called risks of abortion care.

The centers are also evolving outreach to incorporate high-tech tools, employing digital marketing campaigns to reach patients seeking to end a pregnancy, and offering information via chat, text, and online video appointments.

Until recently, a person who Googled “abortion clinic” might be directed to a CPC instead.

CPCs, as a result, are reaching more clients than ever, as eKYROS statistics indicate, but persuading very few to remain pregnant. CPCs in 2015 convinced 4 percent of 307,068 clients to change their minds “to carry the baby to term,” compared to 1 percent of 43,086 in 2004.

Despite that, according to figures compiled by the Guttmacher Institute, ten states agreed to budget about $17 million in 2015 to providers of “abortion alternatives.” 

By all accounts, eKYROS’ statistics, which rely on self-reports by CPC operators, are credible. Independent research and surveys by anti-choice groups find a similar lack of success by CPCs at dissuading patients seeking abortion.

In the first academic study of evangelical CPCs published in 2014 in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Kelly, who has long studied CPCs, writes that the centers’ national leadership has “issued several reports lamenting the declining proportions of ‘abortion-minded’ women visiting centers.” These reports suggest, as Kelly observes, that CPCs “primarily serve women who would have continued their pregnancies anyway.”

A new study in the journal Contraception reinforces these findings, showing that 2 percent of 273 clients at an Indiana pregnancy center asked about abortion over a six-month period. The center in the study offers diapers, baby clothes, parenting resources, along with abortion referrals—the only center in the state to do so. Nearly nine in ten clients asked for diapers.

A 2014 survey by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a research group opposed to abortion rights, reportedly found that only 12 percent of clients at the nation’s 2,500 CPCs were pregnant people seeking abortion care.

The institute reportedly recommended adding more comprehensive services, particularly medical services.

“People want a center that is medical and has services that are affordable,” institute president Chuck Donovan said of the survey results.

Kelly, however, suggested that attempts at reinvention by CPCs may ignore larger, institutional shortcomings. In her research, she described a fundamental disconnect between the staff at CPCs—largely white, middle-class women—and the clientele, who generally are low-income and racially and ethnically diverse.

And, as Kelly told Rewire, the fact that CPCs fall far short of their goal doesn’t mean operators will call it quits or regard the centers as failures. If anything, the meager results cast the centers in the role of David, squaring off against the Goliath of Planned Parenthood and other health-care organizations in a culture war.

“It’s their duty to take action as God would want, the actual outcomes are up to God,” Kelly explained. “The less successful they are, the greater the proof that a fallen society needs them.”