FAQ

Eighty-one percent of your donation to Care Net will fund our programs, which are summarized by the following “Wells of Compassion”:

• Supporting our network of over 1,100 affiliated pregnancy centers with the tools, training, resources, and support they need to effectively minister to women and men considering abortion.
• Supporting our national Pregnancy Decision Line hotline, providing immediate pregnancy decision coaching to women and men considering abortion, who are reached primarily on the web through keyword advertising.
• Supporting our Church Outreach and Engagement Initiative, whose flagship program is Making Life Disciples, a curriculum to equip the church to provide compassion, hope, help, and discipleship to women and men considering abortion.

We will use your donation to continue our work of saving lives and building strong families through these programs. We’ve saved over 531,000 lives since 2008, and have provided over $112 million in free services in the last two years to people in need of support in making pregnancy and family decisions.

The remaining 19 percent of your donation supports Care Net’s development and administrative costs. 

Care Net is committed to financial transparency to our donors and other key stakeholders.  To that end, please click here to see our form 990 for the latest fiscal year. 

Furthermore, Care Net is certified and/or is a member of the top national organizations holding nonprofits accountable to their fiscal/financial responsibilities. Care Net is:   

• a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.
• a Charity Navigator Four Star Charity
• a Guide Star Silver Participant.
• an Accredited Member of Christian Services Charities.
• an Accredited Charity with the BBB Wise Giving Alliance.
• a member of National Religious Broadcasters
• has been on the Best Christian Workplaces list for the last five years

Finally, Care Net abides by a Donor Bill of Rights to communicate our commitment to being good stewards of your gifts to our ministry. You can read it here.

It is equally sensible and logical for both pro-life and pro-choice people to support the work of Care Net and pregnancy centers.

The core of the pro-choice argument is that women should have the ability to exercise their free choice about what they do with their own pregnancies. So, once a choice has been made by a pregnant woman, a pro-choice person should be equally supportive of whichever choice she made for herself. That of course implies that if a woman chooses to keep her baby, then pro-choice people are just as obligated to support her in her decision as pro-life people are. 

What Care Net and its centers do is make sure that women have all the information they need in order to make fully informed choices about their pregnancies. Through a variety of services, pregnancy centers support hundreds of thousands of women and men every year who are making pregnancy decisions. Abortion clinics on the other hand, are only providing services to support the abortion choice. Abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood clinics provide little to no support to women who choose life. For example, Planned Parenthood provided 323,999 abortions in 2015, but provided adoption support only 2,024 times.

When women are fully equipped to make their choice, they are satisfied with the care they receive. Ninety-seven percent of surveyed clients are satisfied with the care and help they received at one of our affiliated pregnancy centers. This satisfaction rating is higher than that of either Netflix or the iPhone.

So, if a pro-choice person is interested in supporting women who freely choose life, then pregnancy centers and organizations like Care Net are a natural place for them to lend their support.

Care Net is different in two ways

• Advocacy versus care: Generally speaking, there are two kinds of pro-life organizations: those involved in compassionate advocacy and those involved in compassionate care. Advocacy organizations are primarily involved in influencing the life issue through public policy, legislative advocacy, and legal advocacy. Care organizations, like Care Net, are primarily involved in influencing the life issue through ministering to women and men considering abortion and giving them the compassion, hope, and help they need to choose life. Care Net is a leader in providing compassionate care — through its life-affirming network of pregnancy centers, organizations, and individuals — to hundreds of thousands of women and men every year.
• Pro-life versus Pro Abundant Life: Care Net is also unique in its approach to providing comprehensive care to women and men considering abortion. This approach is summarized by our Pro Abundant Life stance, in which we work not only to save the lives of unborn children, but to also ensure that they have “abundant life” by building strong families through healthy marriages, responsible fatherhood, and the sharing of the gospel. This expanded focus is unique even among faith-based, pro-life organizations.

It is more accurate to say that abortion has become politicized to the advantage of those who want to maintain the status quo of relatively unfettered access to abortion in the United States. It is a tactic to silence any debate or discussion on abortion.

Certainly, every issue has a political aspect to it, but too many people (including, notably, church pastors) have become afraid to speak out against abortion because of their fear that it is “political,” and therefore a topic to be avoided.

But there are other dimensions to abortion that we should weigh more than its political dimension.

For example, abortion is medical; and it is a medical procedure that involves documented risks. It would not be appropriate to consider heart surgery “political” and therefore off limits to discussion or debate. We should think of abortion in a similar way.

Abortion is also a moral issue. The dictionary defines morality as “a particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society.” Certainly making a choice about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy would be covered under such a definition, especially as science continues to affirm the humanity of the unborn [eg, the fetus has a heartbeat as early as 22 days — perhaps as early as 16 days — after the pregnant woman’s last menstrual period (LMP)].

So, if you have been silenced by someone who has told you that abortion is a political issue or if you have silenced someone using this argument, then consider these other aspects of abortion that warrant a continued dialogue about this critical topic – a dialogue that considers the medical and moral aspects of abortion.

We encourage you to do both. The reason Care Net’s national office is so critical is three-fold:

• We provide the training, tools, expertise, and credibility the local centers need to operate. Local pregnancy centers choose to affiliate with our national office because we provide a high level of service to help them excel in their work. Through the provision of technical assistance, in-person training, phone consultation, webinars, a national conference, and state-of-the-art educational materials, we pass down to our network the tools they need to be as effective as possible. Also, by affiliating with Care Net, the local centers receive the added credibility that comes with signing onto our Standards of Affiliation, giving them the covering of a national organization with a network of over 1,100 affiliates.
• We pass down promising practices to our entire network. When a local pregnancy center creates an innovative way to better serve the women and men in its community, the most effective and efficient way for that learning to be shared with other pregnancy centers is through the apparatus of the national office. We glean from those innovations and communicate them out to the entire network in a way that would be costly or even impossible for an individual local center to do.
• We develop programs and forge partnerships that the local centers do not have the time to develop or forge for themselves. Local pregnancy centers are focused on providing the very best compassionate care to women and men in their communities who need support. This leaves little time, rightfully so, to develop curricula or to form certain kinds of partnerships that could move their work forward. Our national office does this for them. For example, we forged a partnership with National Fatherhood Initiative, the leading provider of educational materials for dads, so that our affiliated pregnancy centers can get discounts on NFI programs. We also spent over a year researching and developing a new curriculum (Making Life Disciples) to equip churches to minister to women and men considering abortion. Making Life Disciples is now being used to revolutionize the relationships between pregnancy centers and their local churches. Such an endeavor would have been difficult or impossible for a local center to undertake.