At the same time as the Belous case, Munger and Buffett organized a “church” run by a minister who had broken with his congregation over his own pro-abortion views. By the pair’s own admission, the so-called Ecumenical Fellowship was far from a religious institution; instead, it acted as a roving counselor on “family planning,” aiding women in obtaining abortions outside the United States in the late 1960s. Munger explains,

  Warren and I were revolutionaries. We created a church that was used as an underground railroad. We supported the Clergy Counseling Service [a group of liberal ministers who arranged abortions for women outside the U.S.]. The minister running it was cashiered by his own church for helping women get abortions. First I tried to persuade the church to let him continue. That failed. I called Warren and asked him to help me establish our own church. That we did. For years this minister ran the thing. That was our contribution, trying to help so that society didn’t force women to give birth—to be held in a system [overpopulation alarmist and abortion activist] Garrett Hardin called “mandatory motherhood.”

  Although this “underground railroad” lost its purpose after abortion was legalized nationwide with the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, Munger continued his activism for years as a trustee and chief financial officer for the Los Angeles chapter of Planned Parenthood. He merged the Ecumenical Fellowship into the chapter and advised it on getting into the abortion business. Munger later bragged that “we were way ahead of the national office of Planned Parenthood in arranging abortions.” Munger did not just quote Garrett Hardin, either. He financially supported Hardin, a white nationalist who was an avowed eugenicist in his “scientific” and popular works.24 In one of his most famous essays, Hardin declared, “Freedom to breed is intolerable.”25

  A Quiet Malthusian

  Unlike his business partner, Buffett himself hardly speaks publicly about abortion, perhaps (as some have speculated) out of concern that it would damage his investments and public image. Population control was more the domain of his first wife, Susan (née Thompson), an outspoken population control advocate who regularly attended meetings on reducing global population growth around the world.

  The two had a curious relationship. They were married in 1952 and had three children; in 1977, the sometime-cabaret singer Susan left her husband in Omaha to pursue a singing career in San Francisco, though they remained married and apparently on good terms. One year after leaving Nebraska, Susan introduced Warren to Astrid Menks, who soon moved into his house; Astrid married him after Susan died from a stroke in 2004.

  In a 1988 interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Susan relayed the Buffetts’ shared interest in addressing the world’s “population problem”:

  Success that can be shown statistically appeals to her husband, Mrs. Buffett said. “Warren likes numbers … he likes to see concrete results, and you can see them [population figures] change,” she said.

  As president of the Buffett Foundation, which was giving away over $1 million annually in the mid-1980s, Susan Buffett directed spending toward two goals: “preventing nuclear war and limiting population growth.” In 1986, that meant grants totaling $300,000 ($708,000 in 2020 dollars) to various Planned Parenthood affiliates, and another $250,000 to the Population Institute (run by Rodney Shaw, a minister who pushed for population control policies in the United Methodist Church in the 1970s).

  After Susan’s death, her estate bequeathed $2.9 billion to the Buffett Foundation over four years, which Warren rechristened the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. Between 2006 and 2018, Warren gave the Buffett Foundation another $2.6 billion, nearly all of it in the form of Berkshire Hathaway shares.

  Funding population control and abortion has become a Buffett family specialty. The family controls four foundations besides the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, all of which contribute to center-left political issues ranging from immigration to higher taxes to LGBTQ interests.

  In a 1997 interview with the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Suzie Buffett—the couple’s eldest daughter and Buffett Foundation chair—said that funding population control is “what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue, so that will be the [foundation’s] focus. I feel as his child that it’s important to carry out his wishes. It’s his money.”26

  That fidelity to her parents’ donor intent also extends to Suzie’s exhusband, Allen Greenberg, a former lawyer for Public Citizen (one of the litigation groups created by arch-activist Ralph Nader in the 1970s) and staffer for then Representative Chuck Schumer (D-NY).27 Greenberg has quietly directed the Buffett Foundation since 1987 (2021 compensation: $784,313) and was Inside Philanthropy’s 2019 Foundation President of the Year for “leading the pushback” against abortion-on-demand with massive grants to pro-choice groups.28

  The Gates-Buffett Population Cabal

  In his 2006 “Giving Pledge,” Buffett promised to donate 99 percent of his wealth to four Buffett family foundations, including $3 billion to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. He also bought himself a seat on the board of trustees for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with what observers noted was the largest donation in history.29 While the Gates Foundation does support genuine philanthropy—especially fighting disease in developing nations—it’s also one of the world’s largest funders of abortion activism and research. Buffett’s gift of 10 million shares in Berkshire Hathaway effectively doubled its assets and ability to push global “family planning” schemes.

  There’s reason to suspect that the sudden influx of Buffett money encouraged the Gates Foundation to engage in abortion funding. While Bill and Melinda Gates have expressed personal support for abortion programs—they’ve criticized President Donald Trump’s ban on federal funding of abortions, and Bill Gates’s father was a longtime Planned Parenthood board member—pro-abortion activists observed as late as 2006 that the Gates Foundation was “shyer of abortion rights funding” than the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, although it had no qualms about funding “family planning and sex education programs.”30

  Whatever prompted its change of heart, the Gates Foundation’s new-found support for abortion programs was most obvious at a 2012 conference in London it organized with the British government and United Nations. Dubbed “Family Planning 2020,” the conference outlined a plan for elites and major governments to extend “reproductive health and rights” to 120 million people in poor countries by the end of 2020. While that includes less controversial things such as birth control and education for girls, the plan chiefly aims to loosen abortion restrictions for low-income persons around the world.

  Funding At-Home Abortions

  Even acting alone, the Buffett Foundation is the unrivaled terror of the unborn. In the early 2000s it bankrolled efforts to legalize the abortifacient mifepristone (also called RU-486 or Mifeprex) for sale in the United States through grants to the drug’s developers, the Population Council and the pharmaceutical firm Danco Laboratories.31

  Although it was designated to be used to end pregnancies before the ten-week mark, according to the World Health Organization mifepristone is safe through 12 weeks, and there is strong pro-abortion agitation to extend the window further—in the case of some activists, much further. This push to extend the window of opportunity and ease of access (including online access) for mifepristone has accelerated since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, producing near hysteria in pro-abortion circles.

  Once taken, the drug, and its counterpart, misoprostol, induce a miscarriage. “Excessive bleeding” is a common side effect that, according to a Real-ClearInvestigations report, requires large quantities of blood bags to avoid lethal hemorrhaging.32

  In September 2000, the FDA-approved mifepristone, to the enthusiastic applause of the pro-choice camp, with one Planned Parenthood board member hailing the drug as a “literal lifeline for abortion rights … because it’s trained a whole new generation of doctors to perform abortion at a time when the first pioneering generation of doctors” was retiring.33 Since then, innovative abortion advocates have attempted to market mifepristone and misoprostol over the Internet.

  Groups such as TelAbortion and Aid Access now offer online “consultations” and mail-order drugs for women looking to administer their abortions at home—a practice pro-life critics call a “chemical coat hanger.”34 TelAbortion brags that it’s induced 3.5 million abortions this way across the United States. Pro-choice activists see it as a way to bypass abortion restrictions, particularly since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision gave abortion policy back to state legislatures. Meanwhile, litigation involving the circumstances of the FDA’s original approval of the drug for abortion—and attempts by lower courts to ban or limit its use—is now reaching the Supreme Court.

  Arabella Gets in on the Gynuity Action

  Clinical trials of the refined abortifacient are run by Gynuity Health Projects (also called Gynuity Institute), a New York–based company-turned-nonprofit that ultimately wants to sell the drugs online. Gynuity is well connected to the professional abortion industry: Beverly Winikoff, a Gynuity co-founder and board member, was a Population Council staffer for twenty-five years.35

  Gynuity opted to test it overseas in Armenia, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Vietnam, Moldova, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine—all poor countries.36 For example, Burkina Faso is a small, utterly destitute, landlocked country of 20 million people in West Africa; almost 44 percent of its people were living at or under the global poverty rate ($1.90 per day) in 2014.

  The experiment’s subjects were given repeat doses of the drug “every three hours” to induce the “complete evacuation of fetus and placenta … within 24 hours.”37 Children were also eligible for the study, and it stopped recruiting only in December 2019.

  Gynuity continues to research many aspects of this medication, its composition, administration, follow-up protocols, and complications in less prosperous parts of the world. Recent research posted on its website include a 2021 study with the title “Postpartum Infection, Pain and Experiences with Care among Women Treated for Postpartum Hemorrhage in Three African Countries: A Cohort Study of Women Managed with and without Condom-Catheter Uterine Balloon Tamponade.” (The African countries identified in this study are Uganda, Egypt, and Senegal). The website also lists recent research in Mexico and India.

  So who’s responsible for Gynuity’s funding? Gynuity’s website reports funding from the Population Council (a population control group) and Planned Parenthood.38

  Gynuity’s research has also received your tax dollars. In 2012, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services awarded Gynuity a $368,000 grant for research into “misoprostol for treatment of fetal death at 14–28 weeks.”39

  And in 2017, Gynuity received $288,000 from the Hopewell Fund, the abortion advocacy arm of the Arabella empire run.40 (It was given another $217,000 in 2017 from the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, a little-known “dark money” donor, backed by obscure billionaires, that Capital Research Center has also investigated.)41

  Between 2003 and 2017, Gynuity raked in $74 million in donations from five foundations (most of it in the last seven years), nearly half of which came from the Buffett Foundation.42 Its second-biggest foundation donor, at $26.4 million, was the Gates Foundation.

  Funding Arabella Advisors’ “Dark Money” Activism

  We’ve just seen that Arabella’s Hopewell Fund has chipped in to help Gynuity, as has Buffett independently. But what does Buffet’s abortion blood money have to do more directly with Arabella? In March 2020, CRC learned that the Buffett Foundation was the single biggest donor to the Hopewell Fund in 2018—which, again, is the abortion arm of the $635 million “dark money” empire run by Arabella Advisors.

  When the Hopewell Fund started in 2015, the Buffett Foundation was its second largest donor that year, behind whatever donor(s) were hiding behind a large donation Hopewell was given that year by its “sister” Arabella group, the New Venture Fund. (And the hidden donor could have been the Buffett Foundation, which gave New Venture over $20 million the same year.) In 2016, Hopewell’s second year, the Buffett Foundation provided it with half its income, and Hopewell’s Form 990 shows it received the other half of its income from a single contribution of $8.5 million in publicly traded securities, which may well have been a gift of Berkshire Hathaway stock from Warren Buffett or Charles Munger.

  More recent information indicates that the Hopewell Fund has pulled in nearly $66 million from the Buffett Foundation since 2015.43 These funds were almost certainly used to support pro-abortion “pop-up” groups—websites that appear to push policies and then pop out of existence—Hopewell’s specialty. Buffett has also donated $70 million to Hopewell’s “sister” group New Venture Fund.44

  Under IRS rules, foundations are required to publicly disclose to whom they make grants, though 501(c)(3) charities such as Hopewell aren’t required to name their donors (only the amounts of their largest donations) in their annual Form 990 filings. This often obscures the money trail, making it nearly impossible for watchdog groups such as Capital Research Center to expose the funders behind an activist group.

  In its 2018 IRS Form 990, the Hopewell Fund reported just two anonymous donors: One gave the group $2.3 million, and the other nearly $29 million.45

  The Buffett Foundation donated $27 million in grants to Hopewell in 2018, making the foundation the largest donor to Hopewell in 2018. (The remaining $2 million may have been gifted after the foundation filed its own Form 990 with the IRS.) The description for each Buffett Foundation grant is the same: “project support,” likely referring to one of Hopewell’s nine then known “pop-up” groups. But which one?

  Obscuring which donor paid for which project is one strength of the Arabella “dark money” system, which is why its biggest clients are the biggest left-wing foundations in America. But considering the Buffett Foundation’s deep-pocketed support for abortion on demand, one Hopewell pro-abortion group stands out as the likely 2018 recipient: Resources for Abortion Delivery (RAD).46

  Almost nothing concrete is known about RAD. Its website is a one-page, seventy-three-word, vague description of its mission: “improv[ing] access to quality abortion care in the United States … by supporting the abortion care delivery system” against outside challenges and restrictive laws.47

  A $200,000 grant in 2017 from the Tara Health Foundation, an abortion funder, indicates that RAD advocates against “burdensome laws” and the “stigmatizing” of abortion.48 A job listing from earlier in 2020 notes that the group has eight employees and “provides legal and regulatory compliance advice to abortion providers” as well as loans to “independent abortion providers.”49

  RAD was created in 2016 by Bonnie Scott Jones, an abortion movement veteran previously at the Center for Reproductive Rights (also a Buffett grantee). Its leadership includes Meagan Cavanaugh, the former national director of affiliate services for Planned Parenthood. Before that, she was a research manager for the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s think tank for abortion research.50 As noted, the Buffett Foundation has shown its generosity to Guttmacher over the years, donating more than $112 million to it in the last two decades.

  RAD co-manages (along with the ACLU, National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and other aligned organizations) the Abortion Law Project, a public database of abortion laws and regulations across the country.51 While many of the group’s activities remain shrouded, what is known about Resources for Abortion Delivery further reveals the Left’s massive network of overlapping abortion groups—and the billions of dollars they receive from secretive mega-donors such as Warren Buffett.

  And That’s Not All!

  Hopewell’s pro-abortion outreach is not confined to RAD. At the federal level, during the Trump administration, one front group for a secret money network attacked political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for opposing the left-wing abortion agenda.

  That group was Equity Forward, and the name of its campaign was HHS Watch.52 Behind them was Arabella Advisors and the Hopewell Fund, according to online job listings.53

  So, what did “HHS Watch” watch? During Donald Trump’s term as president, HHS Watch published opposition research on the Trump administration’s appointees, focusing on their work for social conservative groups, especially those smeared by the Southern Poverty Law Center.54 The campaign further attacked the administration appointees’ efforts to overturn provisions in Obamacare that compel religious dissenters to pay for birth control and abortifacient drugs. With the election of Biden in 2020 (as described on Equity Forward’s website), HHS Watch pivoted to ensuring that “the Biden-Harris administration is restoring our nation’s health department and advancing rights for all people.” In other words, more of the same, but for an administration that can be trusted to be working for the same “reproductive health” goals as Equity Forward.

  Because Equity Forward is a fiscally sponsored “project” of the Hopewell Fund, identifying its funders definitively is impossible. One of the key perks of donating to Equity Forward, or any other project housed by Arabella’s three 501(c)(3) funds, is that donors can make tax-deductible donations while maintaining their anonymity. Watchdogs can see some grants and donations made to Hopewell, but after Hopewell has it, the precise route that money takes is at best a matter of educated guesswork.

  But the ideological motivation behind the campaign is clear from the résumé of Equity’s Forward’s first executive director, now senior advisor, Mary Alice Carter.55 Carter worked for the national Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Physicians for Reproductive Health, the National Institute for Reproductive Health, and the NARAL state affiliate in New York before heading up this Hopewell pop-up campaign.56