Posted on 10/11/2010 6:25:33 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Imagine a young woman riding the subway, consumed by her thoughts: she is pregnant, considering abortion, but unsure of where to turn. She looks up midcommute and notices a sign with three bold words, one beneath the other: “Free abortion alternatives.” At the bottom of the sign are several phone numbers that will lead her to any one of 12 E.M.C. FrontLine Pregnancy Centers around New York City.
The centers — crisis pregnancy centers — provide support for women who would like to continue their pregnancies but are in dire financial straits. They provide useful social service referrals and offer a sympathetic ear for women continuing their pregnancies.
They do not, however, provide a full range of alternatives (like the morning-after pill) or condone all choices. To the contrary, they oppose abortion, and their staff members try their hardest to talk women out of having one, even if that means, according to Planned Parenthood of New York City, showing them graphic images and telling them that “God will never forgive you.”
A yearlong investigation by Naral Pro-Choice New York found that crisis pregnancy centers — in addition to the E.M.C. centers, there are at least four others in the city — feed women information that has been medically refuted (including an old standby, rejected by the National Cancer Institute, that abortions cause higher rates of breast cancer).
Partly in response to findings in that report, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, and Councilwoman Jessica S. Lappin, Democrat of Manhattan, are proposing legislation that would require the stance of these crisis pregnancy centers to be clear to all women who visit them — either intentionally, or by accident while seeking a Planned Parenthood clinic across the street
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Imagine, there are places which actually WANT your baby to live.
The definition of "alternative" means another choice. Another option. Something in place of another. Something other than abortion. Two mutually exclusive possibilities, not just variations of one possibility.
Exactly how is that misleading?
And, as an added bonus, some poor confused young girl can actually feel that she gave her child a chance at life and blessed another couple who could actually raise her child to grow up to be something other than a cosmetic ingredient.
So by Planned Parenthood’s logic, shouldn’t they be required to post notices that they do, in fact, teach you how to plan to be a parent? Rather, they counsel you to kill your baby to prevent you from ever becoming a parent.
Planned Parenthood and the multi-billion dollar abortion industry are huge laundromats for Democrat campaign money, so it is only natural that the New York Times will do whatever it can to help its party.
Nothing to see here.
If they are so concerned about young women being given ALL the information, why do they fight tooth and toenail to keep these young women from seeing their own ultrasound?
I whole-heartedly agree.
You'd think if someone was pro-choice they would want to have all the options available.
Hmmmm.
A person is substantially deluded when they think that telling newly pregnant women about alternatives to destroying their own child is somehow denying them the right to “choose”. Well, in this oft-made complaint by supporters of womb flushing, they tell us that they cannot even use honest language to describe what choice they would advocate is the best one.
I speak as one whose wife has spent the better part of a decade sitting in the counseling room with countless newly pregnant women and helping them avoid making the greatest mistake of their lives, and who now sees many happy mothers with their precious and priceless children.
My little sister stumbled into one of these places thinking it was an abortion clinic. She was in the early stages. They talked her out of it and now she has a beautiful 14 month old son, and is very happy. I’m not interested in outlawing abortion, but I think we should remind women that they don’t have to take the easy out.
LOL! That's kind of like saying "according to obama, Bush wanted to commit genocide in Iraq and that God told him to." IOW, that bit of info can be taken with a grain of salt.
I've toured one of these crisis centers and know many people who volunteer their time with it. It's nothing like the above comment. But yeah ... very pro-life.
The book was published in 1993. A few years later a friend and I went to a Lamott book signing in NYC, and watched all the little kids running around the room.
Oh. Well. They are Slimes readers after all...never mind.
I am antiabortion, not just pro-life.
My first hand experience taught me these “clinics” offer little to no actual “help’ to pregnant women.
They fail on the follow through.
Their “mission” is done if a pregnant woman is not actively seeking an abortion.
This is a MAJOR scandal!!! A place that advertises itself as providing "abortion alternatives" is providing alternatives to abortion! This is SO deceptive!
I’m sorry to hear that you had an experience at a “crisis Pregnancy center” that you believe failed on follow through.
Still, it’s a pretty sweeping indictment to assume your negative experience defines the mission and scope of care offered at hundreds of centers across the country. How many clinics have you had first hand experiences with?
The two centers I have been associated with, one in Philadelphia in the mid 1980s and one in Spokane WA for the last 7 years, both provide ongoing supportive services for women who chose to carry their babies to term, from baby clothes and cribs to parenting classes and medical referrals.
Not quite sure what you were trying to get across by your comment that you are “antiabortion, not just pro-life”. That would seem to support, rather than argue against, an agenda that was focused on just helping those who are planning to abort their babies to see other options.
It sounds like you, or someone close to you, had other needs that put mom and/or baby at risk. Again, I am genuinely sorry that it seems like those needs were not in the scope of service of the agency you turned to. I sincerely hope they were able to direct you to another source of assistance.
These centers are charities and do pretty much what the locality will support with their gifts. The one in our area is building a facility that will provide a place to stay during pregnancy. If those in your vicinity do not provide "adequate" services, volunteer and give them a hand.
susan.dominus@nytimes.com
Dear Susan,
Last year, when I did a research paper utilizing Planned Parenthood's 2007-2008 annual report as one of my sources, I noticed an odd thing. According to the pie chart on page 8 of the report, abortion made up a mere 3% of PP's combined services in 2007. The apparent insignificance of abortion to their overall operations fits in nicely with PP’s frequent claim that the vast majority of its services are non-abortion related.
The percentages were based on a unit-to-unit count of all provided services. If someone comes in for a condom (cost 75 cents), that's one service. If someone comes in for an abortion (cost $400+), that too is one service. And so when tallying up their "Total Services Provided" for the year, Planned Parenthood reports distributing birth control to close to 3.89 million clients, doing STD/HIV testing on 3.36 million clients, providing breast care exams for 1.9 clients, providing pregnancy tests for 1.18 million clients and performing 305,310 abortions (3% of 10.9 million services provided).
But what is missing from their accounting methodology? Time, money and clients. Wouldn't it be far more accurate to evaluate their distribution of services with reference to these criteria? For instance, though Planned Parenthood lists 10.9 million services provided, they list only 3 million clients – meaning the average client received multiple services. So on a clientele basis, you could say that abortion accounts for 10% of Planned Parenthood's operations (3.02 million clients divided by 305,310 abortions).
How about revenue? From July 2007 to June 2008, PP’s revenue from payment was $374.7 million (that's on top of the $535.6 million they received in government grants and contributions). Since they don't disclose what percentage of that revenue is tied to what services we have to try to make reasonable inferences.
Averaging the cost of a first-trimester abortion at $413 and extending that across 305,310 abortions, we get $126 million. If we consider that 21,702 of those abortion were late term at an average cost of $3,000, that takes the total up to $182.2 million. As such, abortion itself directly accounts for almost 50% of their health center revenue.
The last consideration, staff hours, is undocumented and hard to estimate; but when you consider that each abortion includes pre-counseling and post-procedure follow up, the actual time of surgery, plus prep and recovery time, it's fair to say that one abortion is likely to consume far more time and resources than hundreds of condom distributions. And certainly the doctors who perform the abortion procedures are paid a great deal more than the condom inventory clerk. What percentage of the health center staff payroll is devoted to those performing abortions? A very conservative estimate would be 3% - 4%.
Finally, I noticed that a number of the services listed, though reported independently, are intrinsically tied to abortion. By their own classification methodology, almost 10% of the services they provided were pregnancy tests. This is a necessary screening related to subsequent abortions. Another 13% of their services are devoted to giving out emergency “contraception” kits: these are abortive in nature, in that their mode of action is post-conception. Adding these two categories to the broader abortion umbrella means that abortion accounts for 26% of Planned Parenthood's overall services.
Admittedly, while PP’s 305,310 abortions in 2007 represent an increase over the 289,750 abortions they performed in 2006, their 4924 adoption referrals in 2007 were also up significantly from 2006 . Yet they were still performing 62 abortions for every 1 adoption referral. Thus less than 2% of PP's pregnant clients who were unwilling or unable to raise their child themselves, opt for adoption. At many PP sites the adoption figure was 0%.
Thus with ~ 50% of Planned Parenthood’s revenue being abortion or abortion-related, and with 98% of their pregnant/nonparenting clients ending up terminating pregnancies, I would offer three conclusions:
(1) PP’s constant assertion that they are not lopsidedly abortion-focused, is itself misleading;
(2) the success of groups focusing exclusively on live-birth outcomes with benefits to both mother and child, would seriously threaten PP’s major source of revenue.
(3) PP’s counseling strongly resembles marketing.
I appreciate this opportunity to share my findings, would appreciate seeing more analysis along these lines in your future reporting.
[signed]
On what do you base your assertion?
My wife volunteers for these places,
they have medical personel on staff,
and provide financial, material, spiritual, and advisory help for pregnant women.
Again, on what do you base your assertion that
they stop helping women after they talk them out of abortion?
I assume they can provide evidence of this happening?
No? Thought not.
Satan, through PP workers, before the abortion:
"It's no big deal, just a clump of cells, and it'll be a huge inconvenience. Besides, it's at the "fish" stage of development now, anyway."
Satan, after the abortion:
"God will never forgive you. You must spend your life justifying your choice."
I would never direct another woman towards one.
There was no financial, material, spiritual, or advisory help provided.
Just a couple of bored “volunteers” who handed out a list of phone numbers for county welfare programs.
No, they were not interested in helping a pregnant woman in crisis.
Since I was not seeking an abortion, I fell outside their “scope of services” in much the same way and for the same reason I was outside the “scope of services” of the local Planned Parenthood aka abortion clinic.
Many of my wife’s clients cannot possibly imagine life without their precious children.
They could do more, but that is an enormous undertaking. Chris Bell has done a lot of work with follow-up in New York and New Jersey. Check him out on Google. Slattery and Bell have different roles to play. They work together as much as they can.
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