Sex-ed leader and Turnaway Project partner up for paid pro-abortion propaganda

Sex-ed leader Advocates for Youth (AFY) is again partnering with the Turnaway Project to pay students to create pro-abortion propaganda favoring a debunked study purporting that women are overwhelmingly affected negatively when they can't access abortions.

Key Takeaways: 

• AFY is partnering with the Turnaway Project to recruit and pay students to create pro-abortion content, promoting a decade-old, debunked study and paying students up to $250.

• AFY, known for its explicit sex education curricula and materials, also provides stipends and trains youth as young as 14 to become abortion-promoting community activists and "abortion doulas."

• The Turnaway Study, originally released in 2008 by ANSIRH, was a limited study comparing women who had abortions to those who were "turned away," concluding that abortion is not harmful, but being prevented from accessing abortion is.

• AFY has received over $32 million in taxpayer funds since 1995 and uses paid social media campaigns and youth activists to promote abortion on college campuses.

• The Turnaway Study's researcher, Diana Greene Foster, received an $800,000 MacArthur Fellowship and a $2.5 million NIH grant to fund the Project’s research, which was cut earlier this year. 

The Details: 

In 2024, as part of its “Campus Week of Action” campaign, AFY (formerly the Center for Population Options) announced its partnership with the Turnaway Project. The groups provide college students with media ‘toolkits’ and offer activist stipends up to $250 for creating digital social media content promoting the heavily scrutinized Turnaway Study, and organizing a reading or performance of the Turnaway Play. 

The paid propaganda campaign follows AFY's semi-annual “Condom Collective” done in partnership with Trojan condoms.   

The Background:

Advocates for Youth

Known for its explicit transgender-promoting and quasi-pornographic sex education curricula for school-aged children, AFY also pays and trains youth as young as 14 how to become abortion-promoting community activists and ‘abortion doulas’.

Live Action News has reported on AFY’s “Youth Abortion Support Collective Training” which instructs activists about how to train women to lie to medical personnel if they experiencing complications after taking abortion pills.   

Turnaway Study

The Turnaway Study, originally released by the group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in 2008, was later published in a book. The limited study, which compared the interview reports by women who had abortions to women who were ‘turned away’ by abortion providers interviews. The study included a small sample size of 877 hand-selected women conducted over a short period of only five years. In the end, the biased researchers used their skewed findings to support the abortion industry claim that abortion is not associated with emotional or physical harm, regret, or grief, claiming that women who did not have abortions experienced “worse financial, health, and family outcomes.” 

Since its publication, the abortion industry and its media allies have regularly cited and promoted the flawed study without acknowledging its numerous methodological issues and shortcomings, which Live Action and Live Action News have reported.

Debunking The Deceptive & Pro-Abortion Turnaway Study | Can't Stay Silent

Recently, Secular Pro-Life also pointed out issues with the study's findings, like the claim that women who said they were denied abortions were more likely to struggle to bond with their children.

Secular Pro-Life highlights the study’s deceptive tactics, calling it a “huge mistake to think that women who can’t get abortions won’t love their children.” In its video, Secular Pro-Life points out that 91% of women surveyed in the study, who claimed they were initially denied an abortion, reported no issues bonding with the children they previously considered aborting. They noted that by five years after being ‘denied’ an abortion, a shocking 96% of women said they no longer ‘wished’ they had gone through with the abortion.  

Secular Pro-Life

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The Turnaway Study followed women who were denied abortions and their maternal bonding after the birth of their children.

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9:20 PM · Sep 20, 2025

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Why It Matters:

In 2023, Turnaway author Foster was named an awardee of the 2023 MacArthur Fellow “Genius Grant” worth $800,000 and was allocated a $2.5 million NIH grant, receiving $200,000 before the remaining award was canceled earlier this year. Foster claimed she would focus on fundraising; it remains unclear if the continued partnership with AFY to promote propaganda campaigns is a result of Foster's fundraising efforts.

Since 1995, AFY has received over $32 million in taxpayer funds. Through the use of paid social media propaganda campaigns and youth activists, and in collaboration with the Turnaway Study, AFY is using a great deal of taxpayer money for the purpose of promoting abortion to college students.