I started looking into pro-choice and pro-life campaign funding with the expectation that pro-life funding would be extravagantly higher. As a feminist, vegetarian and leaning socialist, I may have been a little prejudiced against conservatives. (Sorry, Mom).
I was under the impression that they were all loaded with money and that they used that cash to get what they wanted out of life. And in the U.S., where the abortion battle has unfortunately fallen into a dichotomized trap, I assumed conservatives would dump wads of dough into pro-life campaign coffers.
I was very wrong.
Pro-choice PACs spent four times more than pro-life PACs. The biggest pro-choice Super PAC spent 18 times more than the biggest pro-life Super PAC. Pro-choice 527s spent 379 times more than pro-life 527s, mostly because super-power EMILY's List spends a whopping $10 million per cycle through their 527 alone. Their annual income is over $50 million, a staggering seven times greater than their pro-life counterpart, the Susan B. Anthony List. As a matter of fact, out of nearly 6,000 registered non-party PACs, EMILY's List ranked sixth highest.
There was no way this could be right, I thought. There was no way that pro-choice campaign funding was tens of millions of dollars more than pro-life funding. That would be absurd.
So I started to dig a little deeper.
I checked donors and leadership boards and independent expenditures and affiliated entities, and you know what I found out?
There are some pretty sneaky loopholes in campaign finance that people with the right backgrounds can manipulate.
Planned Parenthood, for example, operates under a complex network of entities: a 527 committee, two Lobbying Clients, three Organizations, 13 PACs, and 22 Outside Spending Groups. That doesn't even include its research arm or all its PACs with names other than "Planned Parenthood." Within this network, savvy financial managers transfer funds from one group to another, funneling money into a sector with fewer restrictions or into an organization that operates under the same leadership, thus obscuring the total amount from the public.
In another attempt to disguise funding, NARAL Pro-Choice NY petitioned for and was awarded exemption from donor-disclosure, the only group allowed to do so. NARAL Pro-Choice NY was one of only three NARAL Pro-Choice state PAC's active in campaign financing in 2010 or 2012. It spent five times more than the other two active PAC's combined. NARAL NY's 527 Committee took in over $100,000, but has $0 listed in expenditures.
Where that money has gone is unclear. NARAL NY already has a problem with transparency, and the recent exemption only exacerbates that. It serves to further obfuscate the extent of political funding provided by pro-choice groups.
Few people, after all, like a special-interest group with that much money. And let's face it: pro-choice groups have a lot of money.
Rachel Peller is a 2013 graduate in women and gender studies and an intern with Feminists Choosing Life of New York.