It’s now obvious that the abortion giant prioritizes influence over providing quality health care to women in need. Pregnancy centers offer a better way.
It’s now obvious that the abortion giant prioritizes its political and cultural influence over providing quality health care to women in need. Pregnancy centers offer a better way.
M ismanaged abortions, patients receiving expired medication, sewage leaking into recovery rooms.
These are all incidents described in a bombshell New York Times article on the suffering quality of health care offered by the nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood.
According to the report, the abortion giant has been plagued by stories of horrific treatment that patients have endured at its affiliate clinics. One center mismanaged an IUD placement in a patient, leaving her with months of sharp pain and bleeding. To add insult to injury, this woman’s family continued to receive bills from the affiliate long after they had paid their balance for the device that hurt her.
Another center placed an IUD in a woman who they did not realize was already four months pregnant. Her baby died.
As the medical director of four pregnancy centers across North Carolina, I think I can speak for just about everyone in the pregnancy help sector when I express my complete lack of surprise in reading these stories.
My centers often see women who come to us after negative experiences at abortion clinics, reporting a cold atmosphere and a general environment that they don’t want to return to.
Clearly, these anecdotes are more than just one-off mistakes. They’re evidence of a system-wide pattern of failing their patients. In fact, I recently served as an expert witness for the state of North Carolina, which Planned Parenthood of South Atlantic had sued, challenging the state’s requirement that necessitates an ultrasound demonstrating an intrauterine pregnancy prior to using abortion drugs.
I was shocked that they do not require confirming gestational age and ruling out an ectopic pregnancy prior to prescribing abortion drugs. This is dangerous for women.
Gestational age must be determined before prescribing abortion drugs. This can only be definitively done by ultrasound. Abortion drugs are indicated during only the first ten weeks of pregnancy because of increased risk of serious complications beyond that time. Yet, in North Carolina, Planned Parenthood uses abortion drugs through eleven weeks of pregnancy, ignoring these safety parameters.
An ultrasound is also a best practice to adequately rule out an ectopic pregnancy, one of the main contraindications to using abortion drugs. An ectopic pregnancy is defined as a pregnancy that occurs outside the uterine cavity — most commonly, the fallopian tube.
An ectopic pregnancy can be a life-threatening situation for the woman if the fallopian tube ruptures, causing massive internal bleeding, and is the leading cause of death of women in the first trimester. Since the drugs used to induce an abortion do not treat ectopic pregnancy, women who desire an induced abortion and receive these drugs without ruling out an ectopic pregnancy may actually confuse the pain and bleeding of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy with the severe pain and bleeding experienced by women using abortion drugs and thus delay potentially life-saving treatment leading to the catastrophic loss of women’s lives.
Furthermore, the Times quotes several Planned Parenthood employees who describe overworked, underpaid, and undertrained staffers pushing patients through overbooked clinics — like “a conveyor belt,” as one affiliate’s former nurse said. Under conditions like these, mistakes are bound to happen, and patients are likely to feel dissatisfied at best with their experience.
The Times connects this low-quality care to a lack of resources caused by low funding for the affiliate clinics. But it also points out that Planned Parenthood gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations; it just doesn’t send that money to its affiliates to fund actual health care. Due to its funding structure, the money that’s donated to the organization’s national office, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), is largely used for pro-abortion advocacy and legal battles, not patient care. Even the money PPFA distributes to its state affiliates does not contribute directly to clinic services, being designated for uses such as advertising campaigns.
That’s a long way of saying that the abortion giant prioritizes its political and cultural influence over providing quality health care to women in need. So much for Planned Parenthood’s motto, “Care: No Matter What.”
It’s clear that this organization has lost sight of the mission it claimed to have: reproductive health care — a phrase that was once nearly synonymous with the name “Planned Parenthood.”
Through its pro-abortion advocacy, it ironically seeks to create a world in which women get less care. By supporting the deregulation of the abortion drug mifepristone, allowing women to be sent these pills via mail without a prior in-person doctor’s visit, the organization not only hurts its affiliates’ business by forcing them to compete with so-called “telemedicine” abortionists like Aid Access, but it also exposes women to the potentially life-threatening risks of undergoing a drug-induced abortion with insufficient medical supervision.
It’s not surprising that the standard of care they offer is so low. By opposing safeguards on mifepristone, they’ve made it obvious how little they think women deserve.
By contrast, the priorities of pregnancy centers like mine are clear: to offer caring, compassionate, and holistic medical, emotional, and material support to vulnerable pregnant women and their preborn babies.
These priorities shine through in the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of support they provide to women, children, and families. A survey of 2,750 pregnancy centers by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that these clinics offered a total of $367 million of free goods and services over 16 million in-person and virtual client appointments in 2022. This includes medical services such as pregnancy tests, early pregnancy ultrasounds, STD and STI tests, and parenting and prenatal education programs as well as child-care items such as diapers, wipes, formula, new car seats, baby clothes, cribs, and strollers. Clients report a 97 percent satisfaction rate.
For decades, a pro-abortion ethos has dominated reproductive health care. But pregnancy centers like mine present a new approach.
Pregnancy centers bring a life-affirming mind-set to health care. As I serve my clinics, I care for two patients at once: pregnant women and their preborn babies. Many of the women I serve are pregnant under seemingly impossible circumstances — abusive relationships, addiction, poverty — and as a result are considering abortion. But rather than violently severing babies from their mothers through abortion, my centers foster the individual health and well-being of each as well as the sacred connection and relationship between them.
This isn’t to say that pregnancy centers aren’t facing challenges in today’s political and cultural climate. In fact, they deal with many of the same issues that the Times reported Planned Parenthood is navigating: funding challenges, political landscape shifts, etc. Even the Affordable Care Act, which was mentioned as a cause of lost clients for Planned Parenthood, impacted some pregnancy centers, too, as many of their target clients — uninsured women — obtained health insurance.
But pregnancy centers are facing these challenges head-on with their eyes fixed on their mission. They allocate their funds in alignment with their priorities. And they refuse to abandon their patients for political power.
In this post-Roe landscape, this much is clear: It’s high time for a new way forward in reproductive health care. In this historic era, pregnancy centers are prepared to forge this new path.