Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room.

Interesting article at Slate about the internal conflicts in abortion funding groups.

Summary: an organization that helps fund abortions in the DC area started making pro-Palestinian posts on social media following October 7. That drew some angry responses and loss of donations from some supporters, which accelerated after a Jewish employee left the organization and published an article about her frustrations.

I’m posting this not because I want to talk about Israel-Palestine. I really, really don’t, as I have nothing to say about that conflict. I’m posting it because it’s an interesting insight about “mission creep” at left-leaning organizations, a subject that has come up here repeatedly in other contexts.

As the article puts it:

The falling-out at DCAF is emblematic of a much larger clash currently roiling the worlds of philanthropy and nonprofits. Employees at left-leaning, mission-driven organizations have increasingly adopted a worldview that sees all issues of injustice as interconnected, making many less satisfied to contain their advocacy to any single issue. This doesn’t always cause internal disputes: Often, a new position added to a group’s platform will be broadly agreed upon, such as a commitment to ending police brutality, and will function more as an expression of solidarity than a programming priority. But nonprofits that attract staffers and funders of reasonably diverse political leanings are finding it difficult to broaden their messaging in ways that please the full spectrum.

As a result, coalitions that have worked toward similar goals are fracturing over issues only tangentially related to their core missions, threatening their ability to make progress on areas of common ground.

The head of the organization is

still struggling to come to terms with the sudden abandonment of donors with whom she thought she was politically aligned, over a disagreement on an issue that has nothing to do with the service the organization provides: funding abortions in the D.C. area. “I didn’t really understand our supporter base the way I thought I did,” she said.

Yes, she is shocked, shocked! to discover that her simplistic worldview of:

1. Abortion rights are a good cause.

2. People who support abortion rights are good people who support other good causes.

3. Therefore, people who support abortion rights will support this Other Thing that I think is a good cause

has proven not to be true.

Frankly, I find this whole attitude to be selfish. People who work in the private, for-profit sector understand that, notwithstanding the occasional HR blather about “bringing our whole selves to work,” the world doesn’t work that way. You don’t jeopardize your company’s business just so you can use its platform to promote your own personal causes; you can do that on your own time (and maybe not even then, if you’re a high-ranking employee). But folks in the charitable/nonprofit/advocacy world seem to think that their job and their organization’s platform is there to be used to just Do Good generally however they see fit, and fuck the donors and supporters if they don’t agree. Even if that compromises the actual mission, and achieves nothing of substance on the other issue. As Slate notes:

Therein lies the big dilemma at the heart of this situation. Whatever influence an abortion fund’s Instagram account might have on the well-being of Palestinians in Gaza is small: It relies on the hope that playing a small role in shifting the cultural conversation might eventually change U.S. policies around Israel. Likewise, the withholding of funds from a pro-Palestine abortion fund will do little, if anything, to protect Israelis or Jews.

The people hanging in the balance here are abortion-seekers who cannot afford the cost of terminating a pregnancy, and everyone involved in this story wants them to get the money they need to make their own reproductive choices. In the last fiscal year, DCAF helped more than 3,000 people living in or traveling to the D.C. area get abortions. Is it worth it to make a political statement—in an Instagram post or with the withdrawal of one’s money—if it comes at their expense?

I should note that Korman, the Jewish employee who left, is hardly beyond criticism here. (Again, putting aside whatever your feelings are about I-P.) She involves a lot of the classic tropes about feeling “unsafe” and accusing her former colleagues of not acknowledging “her humanity.”