Melinda French Gates Is Championing Reproductive Rights. Will It Lead to More Donations?

Fundraising for reproductive rights has long been challenging. Nonprofits that help people access abortion care initially saw a surge in donations following the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which removed federal protections for abortion access.

But that kind of “rage giving” has been inconsistent and tends to dry up when not spurred by current events.

Now, Melinda French Gates has stepped up to champion the cause, potentially creating a fundraising boom. Last month, French Gates pledged to donate $1 billion to gender equity globally, including $200 million for reproductive rights groups working in the U.S. Already, two grantees funded by Pivotal— the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Women’s Law Center — have joined a $100 million pledge to restore federal protections for abortion access. The funding comes as abortions have been fully banned in more than a dozen states and demand for abortion-related care soars.

“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,” French Gates wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times.

French Gates’ endorsement could open the door for organizations to raise more funding, said Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Support from a major donor tends to draw more attention to both the cause and organizations working within those causes, she said.

Less than 2 percent of philanthropic giving in the United States directly supports women and girls. However, within that category, reproductive health and family planning has received the most funding, according to data from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

French Gates has long been a key funder of women’s causes. For more than a decade, she was the force behind the Gates Foundation’s global maternal health care and reproductive rights work. However, now solo and armed with the $12.5 billion she received from Bill Gates when she left the foundation earlier this month, French Gates is taking a slightly different path and has indicated that women’s rights, especially in the U.S., will be a funding focus.

For French Gates, this pledge is the “first step in the next chapter of her philanthropy,” said a spokesperson for her Pivotal Ventures investment and philanthropy firm.

Cora Daniels of the nonprofit consultancy Bridgespan Group has urged other funders to follow suit with commitments to support organizations focused on women and girls, especially those led by women of color. (The Gates Foundation has been a client of Bridgespan and the firm’s co-chair, Thomas Tierney, sits on the foundation’s board of trustees.)

Meanwhile, fundraisers are trying to seize the moment to make their own push for increased donations.

This is an “amazing opportunity” for nonprofits to encourage donors to invest in reproductive rights and areas related to equity and bodily autonomy such as LGBTQ+ rights, said Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds. NNAF did not receive a grant from French Gates.

“I just keep thinking about this $1 billion pledge, and how it really does have the potential to galvanize more support from foundations and individuals who really recognize the critical importance of reproductive justice,” Njoku said.

Fighting the Chilling Effect

In states such as Texas, reproductive-rights fundraising has been especially challenging. Texas outlawed abortions following the Dobbs decision. Even prior to that ruling, the state had banned most abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. Under that law, anyone who provides or abets an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy could face civil suits, which abortion rights nonprofits said has had a chilling effect on donations.

“Many of our donors that have been longtime givers have been intimidated into not giving,” said Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund.

TEA provides financial assistance, counseling, and other support to people seeking abortions in east and north Texas. The organization should be “thriving” with an annual budget of roughly $2.6 million, but it isn’t bringing in anything near that at the moment, Conner said. TEA raised just $1.7 million in total revenue from 2022 to 2023 compared to a total of $4.8 million in 2021 to 2022. Individual contributions that had leapt to $3.2 million during the “rage giving” year of 2021-2022 — which included passage of a Texas anti-abortion bill, the Dobbs decision, and the enactment of more state restrictions on abortion care triggered by the Supreme Court decision — dropped by 63 percent to roughly $1.2 million in 2022-2023, the group said.

The group is trying to get on French Gates’ radar. “Does anyone have Melinda Gates’ email? We’d like to send her our pitch deck,” the group recently wrote on X. TEA then wrote additional posts explaining its mission and soliciting donations.

“We’re gonna go ahead and toot our own horn and say it: We’re a badass organization doing great work,” the group said.

That is an example of TEA “thinking outside of the box” and trying new ways to catch donors’ attention, Conner said. It is also diversifying the services it provides to include menstrual and infant care with the aim of appealing to a wider range of donor interests, she said.

Abortion-access groups like TEA are chronically underfunded and overlooked by donors, Njoku said. Nevertheless, they are starting to see a payoff from efforts to reach a broader swath of donors, especially younger donors that have been distraught by the rollback of abortion rights, Njoku said.

“The more you’re able to make the connections between abortion access, reproductive justice, gender-affirming care — these are all issues that people care deeply about,” Njoku said. “Young people get it. They’ve been living this life with an intersectional lens and are able to make those connections.”

An annual national abortion access fund-a-thon that was coordinated by NNAF from March to May raised over $4 million, more than double the goal for this year. It was the organization’s most successful fund-a-thon since its founding in 1993, and most donations were $50 or less, Njoku said. Imagine how much more local abortion funds could raise with the combined support of everyday and mega donors like French Gates, Njoku said.

A Media Blitz

For now, French Gates isn’t saying where her $200 million pledge to reproductive rights will go or what she wants its impact to be. Instead, she has launched a media blitz that has included a morning television show interview and a video of herself and younger daughter Phoebe Gates discussing the importance of reproductive freedom.

The $1 billion philanthropic pledge, including the $200 million for reproductive rights, is a core part of her messaging. The full amount is expected to be distributed by 2026 through Pivotal Philanthropies, the charitable arm of Pivotal Ventures.

“Hopefully, this will help our movement develop that multi-decade strategy that we’ve been on the defensive on for decades from the anti-abortion movement,” Arneta Rogers, executive director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

The growing momentum behind reproductive rights is an opening for other groups to tap their own donor base, said Kathy Spillar, executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a women’s rights nonprofit and the publisher of Ms. Magazine.

“I think they should be talking to their own donors about what an incredible opportunity this is to raise visibility on these issues, and that this is the time when we should all be stepping up and stepping forward,” she said.