ATLANTA – State Representative Marvin Lim (D-Norcross) issues the following statement regarding proposed funding for a crisis pregnancy center in Gwinnett County.
“I ask the Gwinnett County Commissioners – which are considering a proposal by staff to allocate $450,000 of competitive U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) funding to a so-called crisis pregnancy center (CPC) named Obria (now rebranded as Georgia Wellness Group and also formerly as Pregnancy Resource Center) – to reallocate these formula funds to maternal, infant and reproductive health initiatives, or any other initiatives, that are not dangerously misleading. Among all proposed awardees for Gwinnett’s HUD CDBG funding, the $450,000 constitutes the largest proposed award to a single private non-profit.
Obria is staunchly anti-abortion, like hundreds of CPCs that exist throughout the country – and approaching 100 in Georgia. Our U.S. Constitution rightfully protects the individual freedom to believe as one wishes on the morality of abortion. However, Obria is an entity in our commercial sphere that does not disclose its heavily slanted organizational views to vulnerable, scared people seeking objective medical information (e.g., they do not state, as at least some entities do: “We believe any form of abortion is wrong and do not discuss it as an option”).
To the contrary, Obria goes a step further in the other direction: beyond failure to disclose, it provides affirmatively misleading, non-scientific information to the public. For example, it claims that so-called medication abortion, specifically the FDA-approved drug mifepristone, can be reversed – a claim that has been roundly discredited by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Regardless of one’s own personal views on abortion, no one providing health services to the public should peddle as medical information what has insufficient scientific basis.
Since 2022, around the time of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, I have several times informed our Gwinnett County Commissioners that the county was unwittingly allocating pass-through funding to a CPC. I am grateful at the steps they have taken in response to ensure that applicants to competitive funding receive scrutiny for providing misleading, purportedly medical information. At the same time, these steps remain insufficient to the extent that staff are still recommending CPCs for funding. And, with the state of reproductive health and misinformation today, it is important that the broader public be made publicly aware of their practices.
Thus, I ask that, notwithstanding staff’s recommendation, the commissioners reallocate the proposed funding to many other worthy causes, including, but not limited to, contraception or comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education, the latter of which is not currently offered even in Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS). To that end, I also informed GCPS, who had previously contracted with Obria to teach sex education, about this business’s misleading practices.
Given the administration’s proposed cuts to HUD, such funding is already scarcer than ever. We must allocate it to those that do not harm vulnerable people through deception. First do no harm.”
Representative Marvin Lim represents the citizens of District 98, which includes a portion of Gwinnett County. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2020 and currently serves on the Agriculture & Consume Affairs, Appropriations, Appropriations Subcommittee on Public Safety, Health and Retirement committees.
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