NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) – The incoming socialist mayor of New York City is pledging to spend millions to provide every new mother in the city a starting basket of baby supplies, even as he threatens to expand abortion and curtail pro-life pregnancy centers already supporting parents without government funding.
Elected earlier this month in a race that generated significant national interest and unconventional bedfellows, Zohran Mamdani has sparked panic for the Big Apple’s future given his self-identification as a “democratic socialist” and his closeness to radical Islamist organizations and groups, prompting even many Republicans and conservatives to pull for left-wing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, to win, largely dismissing any hope for GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa, who lagged behind both in the polls.
During the campaign, Mamdani promised that his administration would “provide new parents and guardians” of all 125,000 babies annually born in the city “with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books,” as well as “a resource guide of information on the City’s newborn home visiting program, breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more.” He projected the cost of the program at below $20 million a year.
While such resources would benefit new mothers, all that and more is already offered in New York and across the country by mostly-privately-funded crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. A recent report by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute found that CPCs provided $452 million worth of total medical care, support, education, and supplies in 2024, expanding the number of clients they served by 1 million and achieving a 98% client satisfaction rate.
However, as previously covered by LifeSiteNews’ Jonathon Van Maren, Mamdani has threatened to put CPCs out of business, pledging on the campaign trail to “enforce Local Law 17, which protects New Yorkers from false information spread by Crisis Pregnancy Centers, including lies about abortion safety and medications” (which historically means true information the abortion lobby dislikes), and, according to Planned Parenthood’s statement endorsing him, “confronting private health care institutions that have refused to provide” gender transition services.
The mayor-elect also favors effectively-unlimited abortion-on-demand and, per Planned Parenthood, “doubling funding for both New York City’s Abortion Access Hub and the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF),” all-but ensuring more mothers will ultimately have their babies destroyed rather than give them a chance through CPCs.
The abortion movement is notoriously hostile to such alternatives to abortion from publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
