Politics The Cookiecott Pro-life groups say the Girl Scouts are selling something else along with their Thin Mints: abortion.

When a cheerful, green-sashed third grader steps on the porch of the house next door, or rings the bell of the neighbor across the street, she’s probably prepping her sales pitch, prepared to answer questions about the type of cookies she’s selling, how much they cost or when they will arrive. She might be ready to tell the person who answers the door about the girls in her troop, the activities they will do with the funds they raise or the volunteer work they have already accomplished during the school year.

One thing she is probably not prepared to discuss is abortion. But that’s what some girls are hearing about from the person on the other side of the door thanks to conservative news outlets, anti-abortion action groups and a continuing campaign to paint the Girl Scouts as in bed with Planned Parenthood.

Launched in 1912, the Girl Scouts of the USA started as a single pack of girls in Savannah, Georgia, meeting in the hopes of getting out of their “isolated home environments and into community service and the open air.” Founder Juliette Gordon Low, an artist and athlete, saw her personal mission in launching the troop as “to go on with my heart and soul, devoting all my energies to Girl Scouts, and heart and hand with them, we will make our lives and the lives of the future girls happy, healthy and holy.”

Since that first troop, tens of millions of girls have joined the scouts, forming friendships, earning badges for new skills and, of course, selling the Girl Scout cookies so ubiquitously linked in every person’s mind with the organization. Beginning in 1917, when the first cookies were sold by an Oklahoma troop in a local high school as a service project, troops now sell approximately 200 million boxes per year, resulting in around $700 million in sales.

It’s through these cookie sales that anti-abortion groups are making their voices heard. Dubbing their effort “cookie-cott,” abortion opponents have been urging allies to refuse to purchase cookies from any girl scout this year to show their opposition to what they perceive as the Girl Scouts’ increasing support of people and advocacy groups with ties, however tenuous, to abortion.

The most recent in a long line of perceived offenses, and the one that spurred the latest cookie boycott, was the organization’s alleged endorsement of Texas state senator Wendy Davis, who last June famously filibustered the state’s new law that will close most of the abortion providers in Texas. The Girl Scouts’ Twitter account tweeted a link to a Huffington Post Live segment discussing potential candidates for woman of the year for 2013. Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis was mentioned as a contender, as were singer Beyonce, Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai and even “the brave women on social media.”

Just one link to one three-minute video with a 30 second mention of Davis was enough constitute an “endorsement,” according to abortion opponents, and justification enough to start the ball rolling for the boycott—or at least for this newest boycott.

In fact, Girl Scout cookie boycotts appear to be a longstanding tradition for the religious right, albeit a mostly Sisyphean one. Just a few months earlier, in October, right-wing Colorado radio pastors Kevin Swanson and Dave Buehner of Generations Radio were urging a boycott of cookies because the Girl Scouts were a “wicked organization” that “doesn’t promote godly womanhood” and in fact “is antithetical to a biblical vision for womanhood,” according to Swanson. In 2012, the Family Research Council, the Christian right advocacy group headed by Tony Perkins, urged its 455,000 followers to pray that cookie sales would lag so that the Girl Scouts would break off their alleged relationship with Planned Parenthood. “The Scouts had better confess their errors and make a clean break while they can,” read the alert, which also urged prayer for the congressional defunding of Planned Parenthood. Even as far back as a decade ago, anti-abortion organizations were boycotting their local troops to punish them for participating in events with Planned Parenthood affiliates. In the case of Waco, Texas, a boycott of cookies in 2004—launched over a partnership with Planned Parenthood for a sex-ed event—continued on even after the troop dropped its co-sponsorship. (Pro-Life Waco’s continuing boycott has now become the staging ground for the current 2014 cookie-cott.)

This year’s cookie-cott may be getting far more media traction than those past efforts (a Google search result brings back roughly 500 news articles and more than 125,000 web hits for the term), but many of the backers of the boycott recognize that actually using cookie sales to force the Girl Scouts to make any sort of structural or vision changes is a lost cause.

“We don’t expect this to make the Girl Scouts change,” says Sam Guzman, communications director for Pro-Life Wisconsin, which jumped eagerly into the most recent boycott. Pro-Life Wisconsin, whose stated goal is to “protect life” from the moment of conception to natural death and who opposes abortion and hormonal contraception, has been actively attempting to damage local cookie sales in the state with their own education campaign about the Girl Scouts.

In Wisconsin, like all states, there are no financial ties between local cookie sales and the national Girl Scouts organization, nor are there any examples, either substantiated or anecdotal, that there is any collaboration between the local troops and Planned Parenthood, even according to anti-Girl Scouting groups’ own websites. To Pro-Life Wisconsin, however, there must at least be indirect ties, since local troops do pay registration fees to the national organization, and they insist that Girl Scouts of the USA at the very least is in bed with Planned Parenthood and abortion and abortion rights supporters, which the national organization denies. Because of this potential “fungibility,” Guzman and Pro-Life Wisconsin feel that the cookie boycott is an excellent opportunity to educate the public, even if the actual financial impact on the Girl Scouts will likely be minimal.

The response to the cookie-cott has been “overwhelmingly negative,” Guzman admits. “We have had some feedback on our Facebook page saying, ‘I didn’t know about this, I will not be buying cookies and thank you for letting us know.’ But it’s a pretty small ratio to the negative criticism we’ve got. I’ve had some really angry phone calls and emails.”

“It doesn’t deter us,” says Guzman. “Our whole mission, the whole purpose of our organization is controversial.”

To Guzman, the most important aspect of the campaign is ensuring people are made aware that if they purchase a box of cookies, they must recognize their money might go to a cause that could harm their consciences. “It’s been pretty well documented by pro-life sources that they are doing things that are clearly in favor of pro-abortion people or stances,” he says.

The documentation is extensively listed in sites like Cookie-Cott, MyGirlScoutCouncil and LifeNews, and ranges from allegations of allowing pro-choice politicians who were former girl scouts to come back and speak at key events to troops partnering with the Susan G. Komen foundation to raise breast cancer awareness to even encouraging girls to represent the group at the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, which MyGirlScoutCouncil calls an “event with a history of exposing girls to concerning activities and information.”

“I think when it really started,” Guzman says, is “when pro-life groups really sat up and started to notice and watch more carefully was when the Girl Scouts didn’t necessarily remove ‘God’ from their pledge, but said that you can kind of pick your own deity or no deity at all. It was kind of like, ‘Oh, that was interesting. Is there a shift going on in what the Girl Scouts stand for?’”

It was after that change occurred—in 1993—Guzman says, that groups like Pro-Life Wisconsin began noticing more indirect partnerships with Planned Parenthood, more links to sex-education materials on web sites and more incidents like the infamous 2010 “lit drop” during an international meeting, which abortion opponents characterized as an attempt to indoctrinate young children into inappropriate sexual relationships and Girl Scout supporters explained as materials accidentally left on a table that didn’t get picked up after a previous session ended. “It’s stuff like that that definitely gets our attention,” says Guzman.

If the goal of the cookie-cott is to get people to associate Girl Scouts with abortion, there are definitely some willing listeners. Melissa Atkins Wardy, author of a book on raising young girls and mother of an enthusiastic Wisconsin girl scout, was shocked to have a neighbor ask her eight-year-old daughter if she was aware that she was funding abortions at Planned Parenthood by selling cookies door to door. “The neighbor said, ‘Isn’t this the group that supports abortions?’” recalls Atkins Wardy. “I sucked in my breath, I was so angry. I looked down at my daughter and she looked hurt. She knew the lady was saying something bad about the Girl Scouts, but she’d never heard the word abortion before so she didn’t know what the lady was talking about.” Atkins Wardy set her straight, and the woman bought a box of cookies. “But when we walked away, my daughter said, ‘Mom, why is she so angry? And what’s an abortion?’ So then I had to tell her.”

***

The pro-life community has another aim beyond punishing the Girl Scouts for its apostasy: steering would-be girl scouts into less secular groups. The most prominent of these is American Heritage Girls, which describes itself as a “Christ-centered alternative to Girl Scouts” and partners with evangelizing groups, purity groups, Veggie Tales and even the Creation Museum, which a scout can visit to earn her “history” badge.

The group, which was launched in 1995, is relatively new. But it’s been savvy about taking advantage of the recent controversy to entice disenchanted parents to pull their daughters out of the Girl Scouts. In February, American Heritage Girls introduced a new “Respect Life” patch to show the difference between itself and its mainstream sister. “One of the things that attracts so many girls to AHG is our strong affirmation of the Biblical worldview, which includes respecting all life from conception to natural death,” said Patti Garibay, the group’s executive director and founder in a press release, noting that the badge was inspired by one troop’s prayer event outside a local abortion clinic.

In an interview with The Blaze in early January, Garibay told the publication that she started the organization as a direct competitor to the Girl Scouts, which she, too, believes has lost its way. “In 1993, when the Girl Scouts allowed for flexibility of the word ‘God,’ I began to have a moral dilemma,” Garibay said. According to Garibay, as the Girl Scouts appeared more secular, her group grew. “Over 90 percent of the people who come to us have left the Girl Scouts—we’re like the best-kept secret.”

Thanks to events like “cookie-cott,” that secret is getting out. Garibay told the Washington Post that membership had grown by 5,000 in just the last six months, and with pro-life leaders like Lila Rose urging families to find “wholesome, healthy alternatives to the Girl Scouts” and Abby Johnson actively singing American Heritage Girls’ praises, that number will no doubt continue to increase.

Throughout the conservative media frenzy, the Girl Scouts have continued to insist that there is no partnership between themselves and Planned Parenthood, and that the idea that the organization is promoting abortion is absurd.

“To quote the Girl Scout promise, we are committed to serving God and our country and to helping others at all time,” states Ana Maria Chavez, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA in a recent video response to the religious right’s allegations. “We do not now, nor have we ever had a relationship with Planned Parenthood. Girl Scouts of the USA believes that reproductive issues are deeply private matters best left to families. I find it unsettling that anyone would use the Girl Scout brand to have very adult conversations. A box of cookies is not a political statement. It is an investment in a girl and her dreams.”

A box of cookies may not be a political statement to the Girl Scouts and their supporters, but to each cookie-cott advocate, a purchase is exactly that. While no one, not even Pro-Life Wisconsin, believes the boycott will result in the Girl Scouts of the USA toeing a conservative Christian line, they do believe that making the public more aware of the “secular” nature of the Girl Scouts is an attainable goal. And if it takes a conversation about abortion with a group of 8 year olds to make that happen, so be it.

That’s a disappointing realization for current scouting families, who are happy with the organization the way it is. “The Girl Scouts was always about empowering girls. It was never about teaching religion to girls,” says Atkins Wardy. “If a family is looking for a religious-type scouting organization for their daughters, that’s fine. But they can’t be mad at the Girl Scouts for not being something they’ve never been.”