Getting the Money
Unruh began speaking to teens at churches and school groups about the importance of purity; she also lobbied state legislators to replace sex ed with abstinence ed. Even at that early stage, she was not the only person to link chastity to abortion prevention or to be horrified by what she felt was pornographic material in her child's grade-school science textbook. The 1990s in the United States were for sex what the late Middle Ages in Europe was for Christianity: a time when politics, economics, and epidemiology (the plague in the 14th century; HIV/AIDS in the 20th) created fertile ground for a few determined visionaries to transform the status quo.
One of the most prominent in the nineties was Robert Rector, a young analyst at the Heritage Foundation, the preeminent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. At about the same time that Unruh turned to abstinence activism, he began drafting legislation that would require all federally funded sex-education programs to teach that any sex outside marriage was likely to be harmful. Around the country, activist preachers and parents were mounting purity campaigns of their own. Unruh began reaching out to these fellow chastity advocates, who agreed, as she would later testify to the House Ways and Means Committee, that such an important effort was "too great" for anyone to undertake alone. For that reason, she told the committee, "I accepted leadership of the project, and the Abstinence Clearinghouse officially became operational in 1997."
Her timing could not have been better. After years of watching hundreds of millions of government dollars flow to such ideological rivals as Planned Parenthood, abstinence advocates could finally drink deep from the federal-funding trough themselves. In 1996, Rector's abstinence-education program was inserted into the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (aka the Welfare Reform Act); Republicans argued that reducing teen pregnancy would help fight poverty, and President Clinton signed the bill into law. Fifty million dollars a year for five years was earmarked for education programs that would, as the act specified, teach "the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity," and that "all sex outside marriage is likely to have harmful physical and psychological consequences." In 2000, Congress authorized another multimillion-dollar abstinence-education initiative, Community-Based Abstinence Education grants. "I'm pretty certain President Clinton did not understand what would happen [when he signed abstinence-only education into law]," Unruh crowed to a reporter in 2002. In fact, funding has more than quadrupled in the United States.; all told, more than $1 billion in federal money has been spent on domestic abstinence education in the past 12 years. This windfall is exclusively for school programs that teach only about abstinence.
By 2005, government contributions and contracts accounted for 71 percent -- about $1 million -- of Abstinence Clearinghouse's annual revenue. That same year, government grants accounted for 41 percent ($241,839) of the revenue at Unruh's crisis pregnancy center. Today, Abstinence Clearinghouse affiliates -- among them hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers -- pay Unruh and her staff to show them how to secure federal grants and then how to negotiate the government's review process. And today, says the women's rights advocacy group Legal Momentum, about 12 percent of all abstinence education funds go to crisis pregnancy centers or groups closely affiliated with them.
