Surprise! "Crisis pregnancy centers" totally fail at replacing Planned Parenthood
TUESDAY, AUG 29, 2017 04:59 AM EDT
Surprise! “Crisis pregnancy centers” totally fail at replacing Planned Parenthood
Texas experiment of redirecting family planning funds to anti-abortion group ends in an embarrassing failure
AMANDA MARCOTTE
For the better part of a decade now, anti-choice activists and Republican politicians have been pushing the idea of defunding Planned Parenthood. Anti-choicers like to claim that these attacks are about abortion, which is at best peripherally true. Government money never pays for abortions at Planned Parenthood, only for contraception and other non-abortion services. In order to “prove” that the assaults on Planned Parenthood are not a covert effort to deprive women of contraception and treatment for sexually-transmitted diseases, right-wing activists and politicians have taken to claiming that the family planning services offered by Planned Parenthood can easily be replaced with public clinics, private doctors and other programs.
In some cases, anti-choicers like to argue that “crisis pregnancy centers” — facilities set up to resemble abortion clinics, in hopes of luring in poorly-informed pregnant women and pressure them not to have abortions — could step up and fill the holes left by defunding and shuttering the nation’s largest women’s health organization. In 2012, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (now Donald Trump’s energy secretary) attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for one such center, touting it as a place low-income women could go for reproductive health care now that the state had cut Planned Parenthood funding from its family planning program.
This argument that crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) could take Planned Parenthood’s money and effectively replace its family planning services, got put to the test in Texas. The Heidi Group was granted $5 million in family planning funds by the state to provide health care for 17,000 women in 2017, even though its leader, Carol Everett, is so ignorant about sexual health care that she once argued that abortion clinics could contaminate the water supply with sexually transmitted diseases.
To the surprise of nearly no one outside the Texas Republican Party, this plan appears to have been a massive failure. Texas Health and Human Services took back more than $4 million in grant money from the Heidi Group. The group had promised to get low-income women matched with doctors to provide family planning services, but was either unable or unwilling to actually do so. (The Heidi Group did not return Salon’s request for comment.)
“The money was taken away from an international organization that has been doing this for years and years, and given to an evangelical, anti-choice activist group with no medical training, no medical capabilities whatsoever to do what they were entrusted to do,” said Dr. Dana Kusnir, a Dallas abortion provider affiliated with Physicians for Reproductive Health. “It’s ludicrous.”
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http://www.salon.com/2017/08/29/surprise-crisis-pregnancy-centers-totally-fail-at-replacing-planned-parenthood/
= new reply since forum marked as read
CPCs are "good" at one thing and one thing only: Keeping (some) women away from making informed decisions about their unplanned pregnancies. Their Republican benefactors- despite their apparent desire to see children born instead of aborted- are not only preventing poor and young pregnant from getting good counseling and care through Planned Parenthood are also seeing to it that the financial and material supports that they might need in order to safely and appropriately care for the children once they actually have their babies are slowly eviscerated.
Of course, Repubs are so stupid and close minded that real women have to suffer before they will learn anything, if then.
