While political battles rage over abortion access with President Joe Biden looking to Restore Roe and former President Trump giving opposing statements on his plan for birth control restrictions, Melinda French Gates is stepping up to fund women’s issues and gender equality in the U.S. Her $1 billion pledge, announced in a New York Times op-ed, will support organizations focused on women and families over the next two years acknowledging rising mortality rates that disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous communities.
The funding is making waves and will leave big marks in the landscape of reproductive-focused groups who rely on donations to operate, but begs the question: does philanthropy trump the need for supportive policy in addressing reproductive health and justice?
“When we allow this cause to go so chronically underfunded, we all pay the cost. As shocking as it is to contemplate, my 1-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had,” she said.
In the essay, the Center for Reproductive Rights, National Women’s Law Center, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance were named by French Gates as beneficiaries of grants from her organization Pivotal Ventures, with an additional 13 non-profits and 12 individuals listed on Pivotal’s website as grantees.
“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. For too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women’s rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match,” wrote French Gates.
French Gates has a history of donating to reproductive rights organizations through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which she announced she will be stepping down from next week. In 2022, Forbes reported that the Gates Foundation had donated $81 million mostly to Planned Parenthood’s international affiliates, though the foundation also provided funding to pro-life organizations, including World Vision International.
Though according to Forbes Warren Buffet, through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, is the largest funder of abortion groups in the U.S., donating $2 billion to several pro-choice groups since 2000, analysis by CNN published Wednesday credited MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with shifting philanthrop to a more collaborative, unrestricted giving that does not uphold traditional measures of impact. In 2022, Scott broke records by donating $275 million to Planned Parenthood, which they stated in a press release was the largest single-donor donation in the organization’s history.
“I think it’s been the bane of a lot of nonprofits’ existence is that, if it’s government grants, they have to comply with a lot of red tape to demonstrate that they’re having an impact,” Amir Pasic, the dean of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy told CNN. “And I think a lot of philanthropies, especially the highly professional foundations kind of emulate that way of looking at things — they want you to know how to measure the impact that you’re having … And nobody asks the nonprofits if these are even the appropriate impact measures.”
Philanthropy plays an important role… But has limitations.
Only about 2% of charitable giving in the U.S. goes to organizations focused on women and girls. This underscores the need for increased funding, especially in the wake of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, according to the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
“Only about half a percentage point [of the 2%] goes to organizations focused on women of color specifically,” French Gates wrote in her New York Times piece.
The need has increased as access to abortion and reproductive health services, amidst a maternal health crisis, has led to a more pressing demand to aid individuals in need. Following the Dobbs decision, reproductive rights-focused organizations and abortion funds saw an influx of rage donations but acknowledged that it would take long term solutions to continue to serve their communities and meet the demands of women seeking abortion, especially as more areas of the country lose access to this healthcare.
“This is the time for philanthropy to get creative and reach out to abortion funds, who have traditionally been underfunded in the reproductive health world,” Kelly Nelson, co-founder of the Tampa Bay Abortion Fund told PBS NewsHour in 2022.
While donations help organizations run, experts say they don’t provide solutions to the root of the issue it’s looking to address.
Rob Reich, director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and is the Marc and Laura Andreessen Faculty Co-director at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University said that while philanthropy can provide direct services to people, it does not negate an institutional effort to meet the basic needs of people or ensure people have what they are entitled to.
“In that respect, charity is a good thing – it provides people things that they might deserve or need. But it doesn’t get at the root source of the problem,” Reich told the Stanford Report in 2018. “For example, is donating money or volunteering at the soup kitchen going to bring an end to hunger? The two are completely separate things. What’s appropriate for a soup kitchen is an aspiration to self-liquidation, to social conditions that render soup kitchens unnecessary.”
Reproductive justice movement leaders have continuously called on the government to support policy protecting reproductive rights and access. In January 2024,13 Black-led organizations penned a letter to Biden outlining the administrations opportunity to advance reproductive justice for Black women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals through advancing voter rights, eliminate restrictions on abortion care, and expand the scope of Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access to cover all intersecting issues.
In March, Biden signed an executive order investing $12 billion in government funding for women’s health, including sexual and reproductive health conditions, pledging $200 million for fiscal year 2025.
French Gates’ billion-dollar pledge is a testament to the growing recognition of the need for investment in women’s rights. But in the face of ongoing political challenges, can philanthropy alone bridge the gap between where we are and where we need to be? The answer may lie in a combination of both private generosity and public commitment.
