Melinda French Gates Funds Radical Abortion Law Firm

By | May 30, 2024

WASHINGTON, D.C. May 31 (C-Fam) Melinda French Gates has announced she will donate $1 billion to feminist organizations over the next two years, including the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which aggressively promotes abortion both domestically and abroad.

In a New York Times editorial, Gates made her support for abortion more explicit than previously, although she did not use the word “abortion” itself: “While I have long focused on improving contraceptive access overseas, in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home,” she writes.

Gates is the ex-wife of former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and recently announced she will be stepping down from her role in leading the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, their joint philanthropic organization.

Melinda Gates has made family planning a key part of her philanthropy since 2012, when she used the slogan “No Controversy” to promote contraceptives as something entirely separate from its controversial associations with abortion and population control.  Critics pointed out that while she herself stopped short of explicitly endorsing abortion, even citing her Catholic upbringing, the family planning organizations she funded were often abortion advocates.

In the years since then, the Gates Foundation has donated funds earmarked for family planning to a variety of pro-abortion groups including Marie Stopes International, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Ipas.

The CRR represented the Jackson Women’s Health Clinic in the Dobbs Supreme Court decision which overturned the almost-50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion throughout pregnancy in every U.S. state.  In addition to filing lawsuits in multiple U.S. states post-Dobbs, CRR has brought targeted litigation in numerous countries, particularly in Latin America, in order to force countries to liberalize their abortion laws.

The website of Pivotal Ventures, the philanthropic organization founded by Melinda Gates in 2015, describes CRR as having “played a critical role in securing victories for abortion, contraception, maternal health and more within the halls of the U.S. Congress, before national and international courts, and at the United Nations.”  The same site notes that another grant recipient, the independent news outlet “The 19th,” has the goal “to empower women and LGBTQ+ people,” and the National Women’s Law Center similarly has a focus on LGBTQ issues.

Pro-abortion feminists applauded Gates’ announcement, although some complained that she did not donate directly to local abortion funds and expressed disappointment that “her commitments are more vaguely about family planning and reproductive rights” than abortion itself.

Many pointed to obvious parallels between Gates and MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has also donated large sums of money to feminist and pro-abortion groups.  Scott gave a record-breaking $275 million to Planned Parenthood in 2022.

The largest donor to U.S.-based abortion groups is Warren Buffett, whose Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late wife, gave at least $2 billion to the cause since 2000.  Buffett has also been a major funder of international abortion advocacy, including by supporting the World Health Organization’s project on human reproduction.  A recent report from the European Centre for Law and Justice noted that the WHO’s 2022 guidance on abortion was preceded by a $100 million donation from Buffett.

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