In addition to its staunch anti-abortion position, HLI is anti-LGBTQ+, anti-contraception, and anti-reproductive technology. Though operating worldwide, HLI is most influential in Latin America, where it operates a large network of crisis pregnancy centers. In El Salvador, HLI’s local affiliate lobbied against repealing the country’s abortion ban.
Father Paul Marx, the founder of HLI, would later establish the Population Research Institute in 1989. Father Marx regularly suggested that the abortion rights movement was tied to some Jewish conspiracy. Under Father Marx, HLI gained notoriety for shock tactics such as mailing graphic images to the public and appearing at international women’s conferences under false pretenses to proseletyze. HLI associates have repeatedly suggested that violent action against abortion advocates is reasonable, even encouraging and defending the bombing of abortion clinics.
Between 1990 and 2012, HLI was embroiled in a litany of in-fighting over financial impropriety and larger scandals. In 2011, then-President of HLI Father Thomas Euteneuer resigned after he was found to have sexually abused a woman during the course of an exorcism. The woman filed a lawsuit against HLI as a result. This was not an isolated incident.
In 1997, HLI spawned the Center for Family and Human Rights—aka ‘C-Fam’—a US based anti-LGBT+ and anti-abortion advocacy group that works alongside the Holy See Delegation at the U.N to influence global policy. C-Fam was established after HLI’s own attempt to gain UN consultative status was denied in 1993.
