RFFA Financial Report
- Wed, Jul 27, 2022 5:53 PM
"Reproductive Freedom For All" amendment finance update
Last week, we wrapped up the "Between a Woman and Her..." campaign. Our previous campaigns can be found on our Facebook, Twitter, or our blog.
Next week, we will be launching a new educational campaign called "Back Alley Abortions For All." Since the anything-goes abortion amendment is referred to as the "Reproductive Freedom for All" amendment, we figured it could also be called "Back Alley Abortions for All": anyone and everyone could perform abortions on women if the amendment passes. Be on the lookout for that campaign.
In the meantime, here's an update.
There's been little to no activity since the anything-goes RFFA coalition submitted their signatures two weeks ago on July 11th. They submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the Bureau of Elections, which is now tasked with having to count and validate the signatures in order for the amendment to be on the November ballot.
The RFFA coalition released its financial report this past week, which is publicly accessible on the state campaign finance website. Spoiler alert, promoting unlimited and unrestricted abortion is not cheap.
They spent $6,254,116.80 to collect signatures—not including overhead expenses. This went towards the paid circulators who were reportedly making up to $24 an hour. Most of the signatures collected were done by paid circulators that came from a company in California.
The coalition also received a large number of contributors. National pro-abortion groups headquartered in New York and Washington, D.C., donated collectively $3.8 million. Most of that was from the ACLU. Their coalition had more than 16,000 donors for the amendment. Among the larger donors were Cisco executive Dug Song, Steelcase executive Kate Wolters, and Indiana mall heiress Deborah Simon, who each donated $250,000. Other note-worthy donors were Martha and Cynthia Ford, Denise Ilitch, and Jennifer Gilbert, wife of Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert.
Overall, the RFFA coalition received $9.6 million in cash donations and $1 million in in-kind donations. That's a lot of money spent on signatures, and probably a lot more will be coming in to promote their amendment.
We need your help. We can certainly defeat the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Ford Family, the Ilitch Family, Dan Gilbert, and executives from other large corporations and foundations because the wording of this amendment is so historically bad. However, we must have the ability to cut through confusion and extremely well-funded denials of the radical nature of this amendment, and we can only do that with your generous effort and financial support.
