Tag: Planned Parenthood

Expectant Mothers and Workplace Pressures

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Last month, The New York Times published a disturbing exposé on the treatment of pregnant employees by Planned Parenthood.  The article chronicled the journey of one employee, Ta’Lisa Hairston, whose experiences were particularly harrowing:

As a medical assistant at Planned Parenthood, Ta’Lisa Hairston urged pregnant women to take rest breaks at work, stay hydrated and, please, eat regular meals.

Then she got pregnant and couldn’t follow her own advice.

Last winter, Ms. Hairston told the human-resources department for Planned Parenthood’s clinic in White Plains, N.Y., that her high blood pressure was threatening her pregnancy.  She sent the department multiple notes from her nurse recommending that she take frequent breaks.

Managers ignored the notes.  They rarely gave her time to rest or to take a lunch break … Ms. Hairston’s hands and feet swelled; the clinic’s plastic gloves no longer fit. Her blood pressure got so high that her doctor put her on bed rest when she was seven months pregnant.

She returned to work on strict orders to not work more than six hours a day and to take regular breaks.  One day in March, she worked a much longer shift.  She soon became so sick that her doctor told her to go back on bed rest.  A few days later, on March 23, she went to the hospital.  Doctors performed an emergency C-section.  She was 34 weeks pregnant.

When she had been on maternity leave for eight of the 12 weeks guaranteed by the Family and Medical Leave Act, Planned Parenthood’s human resources department called her multiple times and urged her to return to work early, Ms. Hairston said.  She emailed the department and said she felt “discriminated against.”  She resigned in June.

“I didn’t get into the medical field to be treated like this,” she said.

The last she heard from Planned Parenthood was a letter asking her to donate money. She threw it in the trash.

Sadly, it is not just Planned Parenthood that struggles with treating pregnant employees appropriately.  The article cites examples of employees at both Avon and Wal-Mart who have had similarly disturbing experiences.

The very first command God gives to humans is, “Be fruitful and increase in number” (Genesis 1:28).  According to Scripture, pregnancy is not a corporate liability, but a great blessing that fulfills one of the callings God has given to humanity.

Part of the problem with Planned Parenthood in particular is that, at the core of their mission, is a very different view of pregnancy than that of the Bible.  For Planned Parenthood, pregnancy is not a gift to be stewarded, but a choice to be made.  And, in certain cases at least, it seems as though some in Planned Parenthood wish their workers would make a choice of “no.”

I have written many times about the tragedies involved in abortion.  Abortion hurts the women who choose them.  Abortion destroys the babies who are lost because of them.  But this story presents yet another tragedy.  Abortion can hurt even those who carry little lives in them and bear little lives from them because they cannot work as long and as hard as their supervisors might want.  How inconvenient for the supervisors.

But, then again, perhaps there are things more important than convenience.  Perhaps life is more important than convenience.  And perhaps, if all this is true, how Planned Parenthood treats its pregnant workers is only the beginning of its problems.

Advocating for Life

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Over these past few weeks, lots of big news has been breaking regarding the abortion industry.  Perhaps most notably, it was announced a week ago that Cecile Richards, who is the president of Planned Parenthood, has decided to step down from her position.  Mrs. Richards’ time at the helm of Planned Parenthood has been marked by scandal, as a series of exposés were published accusing her organization of trafficking fetal parts, and by a total of some 3.5 million abortions.

Also in the news, new research has been published in the controversial Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which claims to shed light on the emotional pain that many women experience after going through an abortion.  If the study’s findings are even close to accurate, they are shocking:

13% reported having visited a psychiatrist, psychologist, or counselor prior to the first pregnancy resulting in an abortion, compared to 67.5% who sought such professional services after their first abortion. Only 6.6% of respondents reported using prescription drugs for psychological health prior to the first pregnancy that ended in abortion, compared with 51% who reported prescription drug use after the first abortion.

Abortion, this study asserts, has deep, lasting, and adverse effects on women’s emotional health.

Digging deeper into the study, some of the individual responses given by women to researchers concerning how their abortions affected them are nothing short of heartbreaking.  When asked, “What are the most significant positives, if any, that have come from your decision to abort?” one woman responded:

None, there are no positives.  My life is no better, it is much worse.  I carry the pain of a child lost forever.  Although I know I am forgiven and have worked through the guilt and shame, the heart-wrenching pain is still there.  I would rather have been a single mother of two and have my baby here to love and dote on than the pain of empty arms.

Another woman explained:

My child is dead and by my own choice.  I spent years of anger, shame, and grief.  It damaged my relationship with my husband, my children, and my God.  For 30 years I did not speak of it to anyone but my husband.  My grief overwhelmed him and left him powerless and ashamed.  For years I cried every Sunday in church, experienced dark depressions, thoughts of suicide, and flashes of anger.

Clearly, the abortions these women endured were devastating to their emotional health.

Along with this research, there is also a proposed bill that addresses the care of babies who are born alive in failed abortion attempts.  Representative Marsha Blackburn has introduced the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” which requires doctors, if a baby is born alive during an attempted abortion, to provide the same level of care for that child that would be offered to any child born at the same gestational age and to immediately admit that child to a hospital for further care.  The House of Representatives has already passed the bill.  It now awaits consideration in the Senate.

In all this news, opponents of abortion, among which I count myself, have much on which to reflect.  A successful and, I should add, gigantic March for Life in Washington D.C. a few weeks ago demonstrates that the advocates for babies in the womb are both many and organized.  Through academic investigation, state and federal legislation, mass demonstration, and, of course, one-on-one conversation, the cause of life marches forward.  It marches forward for the babies who have yet to be born, and it marches forward for the women who have been emotionally scarred by their decisions to terminate their pregnancies.  Babies in the womb deserve our protection and advocacy.  Women who are hurting because of a decision to abort deserve our sympathy and support.  The devastation abortion leaves – both in the lives of mothers and the deaths of children – must be revealed for what it is.

As a Christian, I am a firm believer that life is stubborn.  It wants to triumph, even over death.  This the promise of Easter.  And this is what leads to hope for a world without abortion.

Abortion as Big Business

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Whenever the curtains are pulled back on Planned Parenthood clinics, the results never seem to turn out well.  Through an interview with two former Planned Parenthood employees, it was discovered a clinic in Storm Lake, Iowa had abortion quotas.  Sue Thayer, a former manager at Planned Parenthood, revealed:

Every center had a goal for how many abortions were done.  And centers that didn’t do abortions like mine that were family planning clinics had a goal for the number of abortion referrals.  And it was on this big grid, and if we hit our goal, our line was green.  If we were 5 percent under, it was yellow.  If we were 10 percent under, it was red.  That’s when we needed to have a corrective action plan – why we didn’t hit the goal, what we’re going to do differently next time.

Planned Parenthood, for all the assertions it makes about helping people with family planning, seems to be primarily interested in selling one service – abortions.  Mrs. Thayer went on to disclose some of the techniques her clinic would use to sell abortions:

I trained my staff the way that I was trained, which was to really encourage women to choose abortion, to have it at Planned Parenthood, because that counts as, you know, towards our goal.  We would try to get the appointment scheduled for the abortion before they left our clinic.  We would say things like, “Your pregnancy test, your visit today is X number of dollars.  How much are you going to be able to pay towards that?”  If they’d say, “I’m not able to pay today,” then we would say something like, “Well, if you can’t pay ten dollars today, how are you going to take care of a baby?  Have you priced diapers?  Do you know how much it costs to buy a car seat? … So really, don’t you think your smartest choice is termination?”

Honestly, this kind of sales pitch and posturing is difficult for me to process.  Planned Parenthood workers freely admitted in their conversations that a life in a womb is – or, at the very least, will be – a baby who will need to be cared for and fed and protected, and yet, because of the expenses involved in raising a child, there is a cold calculation at work that says it is better to abort a child than to financially invest in one.  I’m honestly not sure how else I’m supposed to interpret a calculation like this than this: for Planned Parenthood, financial burden trumps human life.

But it goes beyond that.  For Planned Parenthood, financial gain also trumps human life.  For those clinics that reached their abortion quotas, Mrs. Thayer explained:

We would have things like pizza parties.  Occasionally, they would say, “You can two hours of paid time off.”  If your center consistently hit goal and you were green all the time, you know, like, three months in a row, you might be center manager of the month and go to Des Moines and have lunch, you know, with the upper management, or something … It sounds kind of crazy, but pizza is a motivator.

Planned Parenthood is so devoted to selling abortions that they offer pizza parties as an incentive to their clinics to sell a lot of them.  It turns out that they also hand out awards to clinics that increase the number of abortions they perform year over year.

The moral questions such practices raise are inescapable.  Are the lives of babies who are born into lower financial means more disposable than the lives of babies who are born into more affluent families?  Should the future of a life be subject to a financial litmus test – if a life can be afforded, it should be nurtured, and if it cannot, it should be ended?  Should expectant mothers, who often have nagging doubts and deep moral misgivings about whether or not they should have an abortion, be pressured into a procedure to add to a company’s bottom line?

Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics chair at Princeton, has been widely decried, and rightly so, for his crassly utilitarian view of human life.  He has claimed, for instance, “that a human’s life is not necessarily more sacred than a dog’s, and that it might be more compassionate to carry out medical experiments on hopelessly disabled, unconscious orphans than on perfectly healthy rats.”  For Singer, the worth of a life can be coolly calculated by a set of criteria.  If a life meets the criteria, it should be nurtured and protected.  If it does not, it can be ended, even if it is a human life.  It is difficult to see how Planned Parenthood’s financial criteria to determine a human life’s value differs all that much from Professor Singer’s method.

It must be said that a Christian cannot endorse or endure such a view of human life.  Human life is not valuable because it meets certain criteria. It is valuable, according to Scripture, because of its origin and its unique reflection of its Creator.  Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, echoes this sentiment using a Constitutional lens when he writes:

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws to all persons; this guarantee is replicated in Article 14 of the European Convention and in the constitutions and declarations of rights of many other countries. This profound social and political commitment to human equality is grounded on, and an expression of, the belief that all persons innately have dignity and are worthy of respect without regard to their perceived value based on some instrumental scale of usefulness or merit. We treat people as worthy of equal respect because of their status as human beings and without regard to their looks, gender, race, creed, or any other incidental trait – because, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, we hold it as ‘self-evident’ that ‘all men (and women) are created equal’ and enjoy ‘certain unalienable Rights,’ and ‘that among these are Life.’

What is “self-evident” to the framers of the Declaration of Independence is apparently not so self-evident to Planned Parenthood.  May we never allow the inherent value of human life to be anything less than self-evident to us.

Planned Parenthood, Legality, and Morality

Abortion ProtestLast July, the Center for Medical Progress began releasing a series of undercover videos cataloguing conversations between its operatives, posing as potential buyers of aborted fetal parts for a human biologics company, and high level Planned Parenthood representatives, who appeared to be willing to sell fetal parts for profit, even if that profit was minimal.  Selling fetal parts for profit is a federal offense.  Getting reimbursed for the cost of procuring and transferring fetal parts, however, is not.  Thus, there has been a protracted debate over whether or not Planned Parenthood has broken the law.

Last week, a grand jury in Houston took its shot at answering this debate.  Though the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to indict Planned Parenthood, it did indict David Daleiden, one of the producers of the undercover videos.  Danielle Paquette, writing for The Washington Post, explains the reasoning behind the indictment:

David Daleiden, the director of the Center for Medical Progress, faces a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record and a misdemeanor count related to buying human tissue.[1]

In order to gain access to a Planned Parenthood facility in Houston, Mr. Daleiden and his companion, Sandra Merritt, presented fake California driver’s licenses.  According to The Washington Post article, using fake IDs with “intent to cause harm” is a felony for which Mr. Daleiden could face anywhere from two to twenty years in prison if he is convicted.  The misdemeanor charge has to do with Mr. Daleiden’s overtures to purchase fetal parts.  According to Texas law, it is illegal, irrespective of whether or not Mr. Daleiden’s offers were genuine, to offer to pay for fetal parts.

This is a strange outcome to a sensational story.  How many cases are there where a grand jury is asked to decide whether or not it should indict one party and it winds up indicting another party?

The New York Times editorial board came out in favor of the indictment of Mr. Daleiden, writing:

One after the other, investigations of Planned Parenthood prompted by hidden-camera videos released last summer have found no evidence of wrongdoing. On Monday, a grand jury in Harris County, Tex., went a step further. Though it was convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, it indicted two members of the group that made the videos instead.

The Harris County prosecutor, Devon Anderson, a Republican who was asked by the lieutenant governor, a strident opponent of Planned Parenthood, to open the criminal investigation, said on Monday that the grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any misconduct.

Yet despite all the evidence, Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said on Monday that the state attorney general’s office and the State Health and Human Services Commission would continue investigating Planned Parenthood. This is a purely political campaign of intimidation and persecution meant to destroy an organization whose mission to serve women’s health care needs the governor abhors.

Fortunately, in the Harris County case, the jurors considered the facts.[2]

What is most fascinating about The New York Times’ editorial is not its opinion about this case, but how it reports the facts of this case:  “One after the other, investigations of Planned Parenthood prompted by hidden-camera videos released last summer have found no evidence of wrongdoing.”  It seems as though, for The New York Times editorial board, that which is legal is coterminous with that which is moral.  Because Planned Parenthood was not found guilty of doing anything illegal, they must also not have been guilty of any, to use The New York Times’ own terminology, “wrongdoing.”

As a Christian, I have to disagree.  The first and final source and arbiter of moral activity – what is right-doing and what is wrongdoing – is not rooted in a humanly contrived legality, but in a graciously given theopneusty.

At the church where I serve, we are preaching and teaching through the book of Judges and I was reminded once again of how the Bible views and treats unborn life when I came to the story of Samson.  Samson, most famous for his strength, was also consecrated to the Lord as a Nazirite from before birth.  Being a Nazirite involved a vow to reject, among other things, any food or drink made from grapes.  When the Lord comes to Samson’s mother and announces that she will bear a deliverer for Israel, He says to her, “Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean, because you will conceive and give birth to a son” (Judges 13:4-5).  Notice that the Lord is concerned not only with Samson keeping his vow, but with his mother keeping his vow in his stead even before he is born.  The Lord regards the actions of Samson’s mother as his actions, knowing that her actions can affect the child in her womb not only medically – after all, refraining from “fermented drink” is sage advice for any expecting woman – but also spiritually.  Samson’s vow, then, binds him not only from the day of his birth, but from the day of his conception.  Why?  Because even in the womb, he is alive.  And his life is important to God and ought to be kept sacred for God.  The taking of any life by abortion, therefore, though it may be legal, is certainly not moral.

As Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, rightly points out in his commentary on this story, what The New York Times has posited in its editorial amounts to a kind of legal positivism – a theory of law that, while being acutely concerned with societal legality, has no use for transcendent morality.  The editorial board applauds Planned Parenthood simply because its disbursement of fetal parts has been found to be purportedly legal.  The board never takes the time, however, to go beyond the legal questions and consider the intrinsic merits and morality of abortion law itself, for these considerations involve all the questions legal positivism does not care or dare to ask.  But I would argue that some of the greatest triumphs of justice over the previous century have come not because people were content with the law as it was, but because they strove for a moral standard beyond the law that, at the time, was not, but should be.  Watershed victories like women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Act happened not because editorial boards assumed that the legality of an issue was its warp and woof, but because they knew that legality must work in tandem with a higher morality.

This is not to say that there are no questions to be asked of the Center for Medical Progress.  Its action of obtaining fake IDs and having misleading conversations with Planned Parenthood officials raise not only legal concerns, but moral ones too.  There is the moral question of deceit.  Is it ever moral to lie for the sake of a just cause?  Uncovering the true and disturbing nature of what happens at Planned Parenthood clinics is certainly just, but should a person present a fake ID in order to gain access to what happens at these clinics?  Rahab told a lie to her compatriots to protect the lives of a group of Israelite spies who had come to case her city, and she is hailed as a hero of the faith in the Bible (cf. Hebrews 11:31)!  Can we not do the same?

My personal view is that though there may be an occasional extraordinary circumstance – such as trying to protect a life – where telling a lie is the lesser of two evils, this does not make lying moral, it only makes it understandable and, perhaps, reluctantly preferable.  Furthermore, I would hope that we would generally try to avoid willingly placing ourselves in situations where we would feel compelled to lie.

There is also the moral problem of the Center for Medical Progress’ violation of the law in its use of fake IDs.  Considering we are called to “be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1), it is important to ask if it is appropriate to violate the moral law of truthfully representing one’s identity in order to bring to light the immoral practice of aborting babies and harvesting their organs for disbursement.

I would note that even as the actions of the Center for Medical Progress raise some moral questions about truthfulness and legality, Planned Parenthood’s actions raise these same moral quandaries.  By all appearances, Planned Parenthood’s desire to be less than forthcoming about its fetal tissue disbursement practices, perhaps even to the point of deceit, and the question of whether or not Planned Parenthood violated any laws in its handling of fetal organs are issues worth pursuing further.  Planned Parenthood was, at the very least, living near the edge of the law, which oftentimes leads to, at minimum, isolated instances of going outside of the law.

There are many moral questions that surround this story, but this much is morally certain:  Scripturally, putting an end to abortion and the gruesome harvesting of fetal organs for disbursement is one of the great ethical imperatives of our time.  In a story that raises many moral question marks, this should be a moral period.  This is something for which Christians must call.

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[1] Danielle Paquette,“The charges against anti-Planned Parenthood filmmaker, explained,” The Washington Post (1.26.2016).

[2] The Editorial Board, “Vindication for Planned Parenthood,” The New York Times (1.26.2016).

What If Planned Parenthood Is Sincere?

Credit: AFP Photo/Mandel NGAN
Credit: AFP Photo/Mandel NGAN

Last week, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, announced in a letter to the National Institutes of Health that the organization she heads will no longer be accepting reimbursements of any kind for its disbursements of fetal tissue:

Our Federation has decided, going forward, that any Planned Parenthood health center that is involved in donating tissue after an abortion for medical research will follow the model already in place at one of our two affiliates currently facilitating donations for fetal tissue research. That affiliate accepts no reimbursement for its reasonable expenses – even though reimbursement is fully permitted … Going forward, all of our health centers will follow the same policy, even if it means they will not recover reimbursements permitted.[1]

This new policy comes on the heels of a firestorm over whether or not Planned Parenthood has been illegally selling aborted baby parts for profit. A series of undercover videos published by the Center for Medical Progress appears to show Planned Parenthood officials admitting that they do, in fact, make money off the sale of fetal tissue, even if such profit is minimal. Profit from the sale of fetal tissue is a federal offense.

Upon the release of this new policy, abortion opponents were quick to react with cynicism, asking why, if Planned Parenthood has done nothing wrong as it has been claiming throughout this controversy, the organization would need to change their current policy at all. Bre Payton, writing for The Federalist, opines, “Despite its previous claims of innocence, Planned Parenthood’s announcement today suggests that the organization knew its activities were almost certainly illegal.”[2]

Ms. Payton may be right. It may be that Planned Parenthood knew that what it was doing was illegal and was simply gaming the system. But I’m not so sure. Planned Parenthood’s statement may actually be sincere.

If I was to be accused of some wrongdoing – let’s say, financial mismanagement – not only would I adamantly maintain my innocence if I believed I had done nothing wrong, I would take extra precautionary measures to guard against further accusations. So, using the example I cited above, I may institute an annual independent audit of my income and expenses and share the results with key people in my life to make sure I am held financially accountable. But this would not be an admission I had done something wrong. Rather, it would be an attempt to be above reproach in my finances so that all could see I was committed to doing right.

I have to at least entertain the possibility that Planned Parenthood is acting in this same way by refusing to take any sort of reimbursement for their disbursement of fetal tissue. They may simply be trying to be above approach in how they handle their fetal tissue.  If this is the case, however, it terrifies me. Here’s why.

If Planned Parenthood really is simply trying to be above reproach in their fetal tissue disbursements, this means that they truly believe that what they have done is not illegal and, even more disturbingly, not immoral. In other words, it could be that some – indeed, even many – at Planned Parenthood believe that what they are doing by offering abortions and dispersing baby parts is good, needed, and right. What is happening is not flowing out of sinister conniving, but out of genuine conviction.

I used to think people knew somewhere deep-down that abortion was a moral blight on our modern culture. As I have written before, if abortion isn’t self-evidentially morally repulsive, then nothing is. I still believe that most people do know this somewhere within the deep recesses of their souls. But after watching #ShoutYourAbortion trend on Twitter, I have come to recognize that some people do not. Consider these tweets:

I’ve never wanted to have children, so I had an abortion. I’m thriving, without guilt, without shame, without apologies. #ShoutYourAbortion (@favianna, 9.21.2015)

I had an abortion in 2008, and it was the easiest decision I ever made. Long before I got pregnant I had decided that… (Birdy Eugenie-Clark, 9.21.2015)

These women could be lying about their experiences with abortion. But, then again, they could be telling the truth.  They really could be okay with and even happy about their abortions.

Columnist Dennis Prager distinguishes between that which “feels good” and that which “does good.” These two things, he notes, are not always the same. Take, for instance, in the realm of parenting:

It feels good to give one’s children what they want, but it rarely does good. It feels good to build children’s self-esteem – giving them trophies for no achievement, for example – but when the self-esteem is unearned, it doesn’t do good. It feels good to provide one’s adult children with money and other material benefits when they should be providing for themselves, but it doesn’t do good. And it feels good to coddle children rather than discipline them. But, same deal: It’s not good for them.[3]

What is true in parenting is true also of abortion. For some people – at least as far as they will publicly admit – abortion may feel good. It may feel good because it relieves a person of the burden of having to raise an unwanted child. It may feel good because it allows a person to have sex without having to worry about its divinely designed procreative telos. It may feel good because it feels empowering. It is the ultimate way to declare, “No one will tell me what to do with my body! Not even nature and nature’s God!” The problem is that many people have made what feels good equivalent to what is good. This is why I am willing to entertain the sincerity of Planned Parenthood’s statement about the trafficking of fetal tissue even if I am not willing to entertain its objective morality. We may have genuinely come to a point in our society where people have bought into a modified version of the old adage my mother once warned me against: “If it feels good, do it!” We now say, “If it feels good, it is good!”

As Christians, we need to continually remember and proclaim that what is good objectively cannot be determined only by what feels good internally. Good needs an external regulator. Christians believe this external regulator is Scripture and, in a secondary way, God’s ordering of creation. Even if our culture flatly rejects the first regulator, they’re still left to grapple with the second. Every pregnancy, even if it ends in abortion, is proof of that.

I hope we’re there to help people grapple with what true good looks like – and to lead them to surrender. Otherwise, this letter from Planned Parenthood will only be the first in a series of sad, but sincere, attempts to be above reproach while engaging in what is morally repulsive. And that would be heartbreaking.

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[1] Cecile Richards, “Planned Parenthood Opt-Out,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America (10.13.2015).

[2] Bre Payton, “Planned Parenthood: We’re Going To Stop Doing That Thing We Said Was Totally Legal,” The Federalist (10.13.2015).

[3] Dennis Prager, “Feeling Good vs. Doing Good,” National Review (10.22.2015).