In March 2019, right-leaning and pro-life websites criticized the Girl Scouts of the USA in response to reports about a member in Southern Arizona who planned to achieve the organization’s “Gold Award” with a project about women’s reproductive health.

On 5 March, the website LifeNews.com published an article with the headline “Girl Scouts Gives Its Highest Award to Teen Who Organized Campaign Promoting Abortion,” which continued:

The Girl Scouts’ support of abortion is growing increasingly apparent in the information age. Its materials, social media accounts and more point to the organization’s pro-abortion bias. One of the groups exposing it, MyGirlScoutCouncil.com, posted more evidence Friday on its Facebook page. Breitbart reports the group discovered that the Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona recently honored a teen for her volunteer work on “reproductive health justice” – an umbrella term that includes abortion on demand. Meghna Gopalan, recently profiled in a Tucson publication, received the Gold Award, the Girl Scouts highest honor, for her work. Her project involved working with the pro-abortion Women’s March and its affiliate in Tucson. She said her goal was to “educate people about and destigmatize access to women’s healthcare” — euphemisms for abortion.

The right-leaning website Daily Wire published an article with a headline that similarly claimed “Girl Scouts Give Highest Award to Girl Who Organized a Pro-Abortion Campaign.”

Also, MyGirlScoutCouncil.com, a pro-life website that publishes criticisms and concerns about the iconic civic group, posted to Facebook, describing the controversy as follows:

“A project to “educate people about and destigmatize access to women’s healthcare” earns Girl Scouts Gold Award, its highest award. Completing this Girl Scout project for “reproductive health justice” began by joining the Women’s March.”

The original source of these outraged responses was a November 2018 article published by the website “This is Tucson,” which featured a brief interview with Gopalan. The article read: