On a recent Saturday, a woman wearing an orange safety vest and a body camera stopped a car trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois.

“Hello, can I talk to you for a minute?” the woman, Sheri King, said to the driver, reaching into her vest pocket for a brochure with information about alternatives to abortion and contraception. “I’m Sheri.”

A Planned Parenthood volunteer ran up to the car and told the driver to move on.

“You’re not from the clinic,” shouted the volunteer.

Instead, King and a partner were with Coalition Life, a Missouri-based anti-abortion nonprofit group that makes most of its money there. Almost every minute the Illinois abortion clinic is open, Coalition Life representatives stand outside the clinic, trying to intercept people seeking abortions and persuade them to change their minds.

Since abortion became illegal in Missouri two years ago after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision, Coalition Life has refined its strategy. Because there are no abortion clinics in Missouri, Coalition Life operates primarily out of clinics in other states where the procedure is still legal. The group’s website says it has one location in Kansas and five in Illinois, including in Fairview Heights, about 13 miles east of St. Louis.

On its website, Coalition Life describes itself as “America’s largest professional public transit counseling organization.” The group’s revenue has grown sharply in recent years, thanks in part to a lucrative Missouri tax credit for pregnancy counseling centers, of which the organization is a member. After a massive expansion of the tax credit program by the state legislature in 2019, donors to Coalition Life and similar nonprofits can receive tax credits equal to 70% of their donation amount, giving a major boost to the groups’ fundraising efforts across Missouri.

The tax credit has resulted in increasing financial costs for Missouri taxpayers. Last year alone, over $11.2 million in tax credits were approved. Before the change, the tax credit was capped at $3.5 million per year. Combined with the $8.6 million the state directly awards to pregnancy centers, Missouri leads the country in per capita investment in abortion control centers.

While Missouri doesn’t spend the most on abortion rights overall – Texas, with its much larger population, leads the nation with $140 million in spending over two years – the investment is still notable relative to its size. Still, it pales in comparison to this year’s budget of nearly $52 billion.

The money raised through tax credits is intended to support services for clients facing unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. These services include pregnancy testing, counseling, emotional and material support, and other related services.

Coalition Life has adapted to the post-Roe situation by paying people to work outside abortion clinics in other states. The group claims it refers many of the women it convinces to have abortions to its Missouri pregnancy center, just outside St. Louis. There, it offers ultrasounds and counseling and continues to care for mothers until their babies are born – sometimes even longer.

Because that center is more expensive to operate and most of its clients are Missouri residents, the group said most of the money collected in Missouri is spent in the state. There was no independent way to confirm that claim.

Some lawmakers did not envision the use of pregnancy center subsidies to fight abortion in Missouri’s border states. Vic Allred, a Republican former lawmaker from the Kansas City area who voted to expand the tax credit, said he never imagined Missouri taxpayer money would go toward fighting abortion in other states.

Allred said the state should exert some control over how the money is spent. The tax credit, he said, is intended as a “pat on the back for not having an abortion, for having this support, for having these people helping you, for having these resources, for easing the burden on the young mother.” He said it is not intended to fund “a political organization.”

Under this program, state taxpayers’ tax burden is reduced by $700 for every $1,000 donated to one of the dozens of state-approved anti-abortion nonprofits. Donors can reduce their costs even further by deducting the remaining $300 from their income when filing their tax returns.

At a fundraiser at the St. Louis airport two years ago, Brian Westbrook, founder and executive director of Coalition Life, explained how donors could use the tax credit to make significantly larger donations to support the group’s work in states where abortion is legal, according to a recording of the event obtained by ProPublica.

“A $1,000 donation tonight could cost you just $141,” he said, but then he raised the goal even higher, asking donors to consider giving more than $71,000 to qualify for the maximum $50,000 tax credit.

Missouri does not disclose the recipients of its pregnancy support tax credits or the amounts donated to individual nonprofits. Westbrook said in an interview that the tax credits have been important to his group’s fundraising efforts. Coalition Life had $800,000 in revenue in 2019, when lawmakers voted to expand the tax credit; by 2022, that amount had more than doubled, to $1.7 million.

At the fundraiser, Westbrook told donors that Coalition Life expects its annual budget to grow to more than $8 million in three years.

In the past two years, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and North Dakota have enacted tax credits for donations to pregnancy centers. Lawmakers in several other states have considered similar programs.

Groups raising money using Missouri’s tax credit must show they are helping people struggling with unplanned or unwanted pregnancies; state law does not require the work to be done in Missouri. A spokesperson for the state did not respond to a question about whether reaching out to people outside of abortion clinics in other states would qualify for the program.

The law also does not appear to prohibit groups participating in the tax credit program from using donations as part of a broader anti-abortion campaign. Coalition Life ran radio ads urging citizens to “think twice” before signing a petition for a statewide vote on an amendment to the Missouri Constitution to restore some abortion rights. The petition claimed it would allow late-term and partial-term abortions.

Nevertheless, the proposal was put to a vote and will be presented to voters in November.

Melissa Barreca, a spokeswoman for Coalition Life, said the ads were “an attempt to educate the public and encourage them to learn, read and investigate these issues for themselves” and were consistent with the group’s mission.

After Missouri’s abortion ban went into effect, Planned Parenthood began referring patients to its Fairview Heights location, which opened in 2019. Westbrook said at the fundraiser that God called his group to shift its focus to Illinois. “This abortion clinic is run by the exact same people who run the abortion clinic in St. Louis — or used to run St. Louis,” Westbrook told donors. Coalition Life then opened a location next door.

The organization also places paid staff outside clinics in the Chicago area, southern Illinois and Kansas. Westbrook has said he wants to expand the group to other states where abortion is legal; he and his wife and their seven children recently completed a 20-day tour of the East Coast.

Ingrid Burnett, a Democratic representative from Kansas City, voted against expanding the tax credit in 2019. She said the program was portrayed as support for mothers who are forced to carry their children to term and may need counseling and material assistance to bring a child into the world.

“It seems to me that we’re crossing a line here if we’re using this to send people across state lines to influence women who have made this decision and who may or may not be from Missouri,” she said.

Abortion advocates also said it was troubling that Missouri was subsidizing anti-abortion groups while the state’s maternal mortality rate was rising and the social safety net was thin, especially in rural areas.

“I can think of a million ways they could spend the funds to support the people of Missouri, especially women and families, and not a dollar would go to this tax credit,” says Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which serves Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and western Missouri.

Barreca was upset by the way Wales characterized Coalition Life’s presence outside abortion clinics.

“They are actually providing services to women,” she said in an email. “They are doing a job. They are not protestors. They are not picketers. Would abortion providers prefer it if women had no other choice?”