ACLU Accuses U.S. of Funding Religion : Health: Suit challenges so-called Chastity Act, which finances high school programs that encourage abstinence and stress adoption over abortion.

The American Civil Liberties Union is charging that the Department of Health and Human Services is funding religious campaigns against abortion and teen-age sex, violating the First Amendment’s ban on government-sponsored religion, according to documents filed in federal court here.

The documents pertain to a case likely to go to trial next year that marks the latest battle in a war between abortion-rights groups and those opposed to abortion. At issue is to what extent government funds may be used in--or kept out of--family planning, teen counseling or public health programs in which abortion might be discussed.

The current lawsuit involves a challenge by the ACLU to the constitutionality of Title XX of the Adolescent Family Life Act of 1981, the so-called Chastity Act, which funds high school programs encouraging sexual abstinence and stressing adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Last May, the Supreme Court ruled that family planning clinics could lose their federal funding by allowing doctors to discuss abortion with their patients. The opinion, written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, said that government is not obliged to subsidize abortion counseling, even if abortion is legal.

The case pending before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey turns that question around: Can federal money be used to subsidize counseling programs that sometimes include anti-abortion messages, references to religion or both?

Since 1982, HHS has given roughly $2.8 billion in grants to 164 private groups--including Brigham Young University and the Visiting Nurse Assn. This year, its $7.8-million budget supports 57 projects in 30 states and Puerto Rico, according to an HHS fact sheet.

According to documents produced by HHS in response to the ACLU lawsuit, 27 of those groups identify themselves as having specifically religious affiliations. The rest are state agencies, private nonprofit groups, school systems or hospitals.

There is no ban on federal money going to religious organizations, as long as those groups do not use the money to promote religion. HHS regulations for Title XX remind grant recipients that they are expected to abide by those restrictions, and the agency rigorously monitors the programs to make sure they do, said Lucy Eddinger, a spokeswoman for the Office of Population Affairs.

She added that the agency, through its Justice Department lawyers, reviews all high school curricula funded by Title XX, and that grant recipients have been asked to revise their programs if the agency thought that they had a religious message.

But the ACLU says that HHS oversight is ineffective and that the concept behind the law creates an unlawful government entanglement with religion. The ACLU lost its first challenge of the law in June, 1988, when the Supreme Court ruled that the language of the statute did not violate the First Amendment, despite evidence “of specific incidents of impermissible behavior” by grant recipients.

The current lawsuit, Kendrick vs. Sullivan, focuses on a question the court left unresolved: whether Title XX, though constitutional in theory, can still be struck down because it is used in an unconstitutional way.

The resulting factual dispute has become a fierce battle in federal court here. In a recent pretrial opinion, Richey wrote that he had never seen a First Amendment case rivaling this one in its “ferocity and magnitude.”

In recent months, lawyers from the ACLU’s Reproductive Rights Project have been combing the country, taking depositions from employees of Title XX grant recipients in an effort to uncover ties to religious groups or religious messages in the counseling they offer.

“We’re subpoenaing employees who look knowledgeable and asking for their records from HHS, or we fly out to wherever they’re located and look at their records,” said Andrew Dwyer, an ACLU staff attorney in New York. “Either they tell us the truth, or they are forced to tell us the truth, or they don’t. We end up turning up a lot of stuff, despite all that.”

The ACLU charges that many Title XX grant recipients recruit workers from churches, use their federal grants to refer clients to religious groups and use religion in their counseling sessions. Among the examples they have cited in court files:

* Pregnancy Distress Center of Columbus, Ohio, which received more than $137,000 in federal grant money between 1987 and 1989, at one point used a volunteer training manual that suggested that volunteers ask any woman considering an abortion: “If Jesus were sitting right here, would he tell you that it’s all right to have an abortion?”

* A Catholic Charities social worker in Philadelphia reported to HHS inspectors that “she, as a Catholic social worker, did not like being told that she could not mention God in her work,” and that she sometimes advised her clients to solve their problems with prayer.

Some grant recipients say that the ACLU is simply harassing them, pursuing a pro-abortion rights agenda in the guise of protecting the First Amendment.

“The current (government) policy is that responsible sex is based on fidelity and commitment,” said Joanne Gasper, director of one Title XX-funded project, a Falls Church, Va., group named Teen Choice. “If it happens that good health practices and good policy coincide with religious tenets, that doesn’t mean we should stop teaching good health.”