Due to the political, passionate and divisive nature of abortion women facing unplanned pregnancy are often the
Every woman has 3 Choices
victims of biased information and sales tactics at abortion clinics and elsewhere. It is our belief based on serving thousands of abortion-minded women across the country every year that women need to be insulated from these added agenda driven pressures. Furthermore, if they are insulated and at the same time given all the information and about all their options (abortion, adoption, and parenting) as well as the medical support needed at the moment more often than not she will choose to have her baby. Not a sane woman alive actually wants to have an abortion. They feel trapped, like abortion is their only way out. It is the job of the pregnancy center to provide support and security such that she realizes that she can actually pursue other options, a real choice.
So, in the interests of fairness and the desire to avoid non-exploitative behavior, organizations should:
1. Fully disclose the financial profit they stand to gain if the woman chooses one option over another.
2. Refrain from manipulation and coercive tactics such as inflaming irrational fear and panic.
3. Ask and obtain permission at each stage of the consultation process.
4. Conduct anonymous paper-and-pencil exit surveys to assess client/patient satisfaction with the organization. (See Attached Sample Exit Survey Here Client/Patient Exit Survey)
At the average medical PRC, why is it that only 10% of the entire client load actually pregnant women seriously considering abortion? We have found that it has to do with how services are provided . . . based on a secular humanistic model of counseling. Can those Pregnancy Care Centers reverse that trend to 90% or more? The bad news is that we have only found one way to fix this problem and it cannot be done in less than 4 months and with nothing short of changing the way services are offered. To read a more detailed history of the pregnancy resource center model and why it is not working click the following link: Analysis of Why the PRC Is Not Working and How to Fix It
Let me clarify. Ultimately we need to have a trend reversal in the mission critical areas of the pregnancy center. This number of just 10% of all clients seen as at risk for abortion represents a deeper problem. For example, let’s say that your organization schedules an average of 200 appointments per year that actually show up. And of those 200 only 20 are considered pregnant and at risk for abortion. Furthermore lets say that you have the capacity to see 500 more clients this year. Since the typical PRC service strategy affords you the opportunity to see approximately 10% of your entire client load at risk for abortion (20 out of 200) you need to find a way to increase that.
Is this a marketing problem or is it deeper?
Let’s explore that question. To increase your client load to 700 using your same service strategy will only get you 105 total pregnant women at risk for abortion assuming you get all 700 women in the door. If the annual number of women in the market for an abortion in your area is 2,000 and you want to reach them all you immediately have a problem. To reach 2,000 using your current strategy would mean you would have to serve a little under 14,000 clients per year. I don’t know about you but our organization could not afford that. We had to find another way.
While advertising may be a valid concern it is not the primary problem. Women respond over time more to what an organization does and less to how it advertises. The real challenge for us is to come up with a model of service delivery that is laser focused on that one type of woman who is seriously considering abortion in our respective communities (i.e. 18-24 year old, college or young professional, single woman who is predominantly Caucasian). If you can reach her you can reach anyone else who may be considering abortion. But to do that you will need to re-engineer the services you provide as well as how you provide them. Building an organization that consistently reaches pregnant, at risk women requires 1) adopting a new more Biblical philosophy of service, 2) re-engineering your service to be consistent with that philosophy of service, and 3) time for news to spread into the population (6-18 months after re-invent).
I have uploaded a position paper Analysis of Why the PRC Is Not Working and How to Fix It providing more historical background on these issues. Also, consider exploring some of the case histories of PRCs that have made the jump to a new model of service and have seen a dramatic shift in their patient load on CompassCare’s Training website at www.compasscaretraining.org.
Imagine 95% of the pregnant clients that walk through your doors at risk for abortion. What if I told you that there are pregnancy centers currently operating for whom this is happening. What if I told you that there are medical PRCs right now for whom 80-90% of their client load is actually pregnant?
There is a saying I use in our executive training OT training, “Strategic Marketing is everything you do.” It is important to note that it really does not matter how large of a population you are attempting to reach, the population of women is fairly connected and the group of women you need to reach is always a very small percentage of that larger population of women and perhaps even more connected to one another due to their close age (18-24). Essentially this means that word gets out fast about an organization in terms of what is provided and how it is provided even in fairly large towns.
The average pregnancy resource center spends less than 10% of its resources on pregnant women who are seriously considering abortion. The following graph represents typical trends seen in the average PRC. Note that with each step there is approximately a 50% reduction in the number of women who actually qualify to go to the next level of service. Whether your organization is scheduling 1000 appointments or 100 take a look at your trends and see if they are in the ball park with the trends shown in this graph.
Advertising outlets and messaging is only as effective at reaching the abortion-minded woman as your service delivery strategy is at over delivering on her expectations. In fact advertising that hits your target of at risk women will work against you over time on a bell curve if the services provided do not match with her expectations. If an organization has a reputation for not providing relevant services or providing those services in a relevant way, even if that reputation is outdated or untrue, it will take at least a four year cycle to reinvent that reputation through re-engineering the services that are provided and the manner in which they are provided to better match with the expectations of the woman who is considering abortion.
What every PRC executive wants is to move their organization from the trend shown in the graph above to the one shown below. But we cannot get there by doing more of what we are currently doing. To save 1000 lives with the current service process used in an average medical PRC they would have to schedule over 25000 appointments every year. I don’t know of a single organization that has the resources to do that. We have to be willing to understand what is not working and change it to see more lives saved using fewer resources.
Increased PRC effectiveness requires a shift in the way we do things
Imagine seeing more at risk pregnant women and more of them having their babies while having your overall non-pregnant or not-at-risk client load decrease to less than 5% of the total clients your serve. The best way to optimize the results your center is getting is by re-engineering your services, moving from a traditional or client-focused model to a linear or problem-focused model of service. You can read more about it at www.compasscaretraining.org.
What do therapy dogs have to do with pregnancy care centers? Therapy dogs have proven to raise morale of long term hospital patients which in turn improves the patient’s overall health. But are their times when there are NO DOGs ALLOWED? If you don’t know your ethical standards anything goes and it will become increasingly more difficult to determine what should and should NOT be done when serving clients/patients. Without know your ethical standards and how they apply it is very easy for good intentions to degenerate into poor or unethical performance.
It is the same way with serving women facing unplanned pregnancy. There are things to do and things not to do. There are times to do them and times not to do them. This post is the third of a four part series of knowing your pregnancy center’s ethical standards of care.
Informed Decision-making:
To promote informed decision-making organizations should help to answer the 3 basic questions every woman needs to have answered in order to determine the outcome of her pregnancy:
A. Am I really pregnant? It is possible to not have a viable pregnancy and have a positive home pregnancy test.
A woman needs a medically definitive diagnosis of pregnancy confirmation using ultrasound technology or blood tests.
B. How far along in the pregnancy am I? The further along in the pregnancy a woman is increases the complexity of her options.
A woman needs an ultrasound scan to determine the exact gestational age of the baby. Gestational age determines the type of abortion procedure she would be eligible to receive.
All abortion procedures are medical procedures. Therefore each abortion procedure has different costs and different risks associated with them.
Gestational age is important to know in terms of providing medically accurate information about fetal development.
C. Is it important to know if I have a sexually transmitted disease (STD)? STDs can negatively impact future reproductive health if left untreated.
Some STDs if left untreated prior to an abortion procedure increase the risk of infection which can put a woman’s reproductive health in jeopardy.
Testing and treatment for the most common STDs, Gonorrhea and Chlamydia, is essential to prior to an abortion to safeguard a woman’s reproductive health.
To learn more about how to apply ethical standards through a linear service process that holds all staff and volunteers accountable to those standards go to www.compasscaretraining.org.
The only way to ensure that your pregnancy help medical clinic’s good intentions actually are provided in a way that is consistent and ethical requires that we as Executives know what our ethical standards are and that those ethics are applied with every step of a client/patient interaction. Just because we believe in the good intentions of our volunteers and staff does not necessarily mean that they are interacting with our clients in an ethical manner. Being a Christian is not enough for ethically delivering services medical or otherwise to women facing unintended pregnancy.
Sadly, you and I know that a woman’s decision about the outcome of her pregnancy is so often fraught with irrational fear, inadequate information, little to no counseling, sales tactics from financially vested interests, and coercive pressure from self-interested others that a woman does not feel like she has any other choice. In a 2004 study published in the Medical Science Monitor 84% of the American sample of women said that they did not receive adequate counseling before receiving an abortion. Additionally 64% felt pressured by others which would include boyfriends, parents, spouses, etc (Medical Science Monitor, 2004; 10 (10): SR5-16, Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women; Vincent M. Rue, Priscilla K. Coleman, James J. Rue, David C. Reardon).
Given these considerations and the importance of insulating women facing an unplanned pregnancy from intentional or unintentional negative influence, all organizations seeking to assist these women should employ 3 categories of ethical standards in their delivery of services: A) Supportive Decision-making, B) Informed Decision-making, and C) Transparency.
A. Supportive Decision-making:
To respect and enhance a woman’s ability to make decisions regarding pregnancy outcomes, organizations should help by using these important pregnancy decision-making tasks:
Assessment of woman’s current social situation including relationship support structures (i.e. father of the baby, parental involvement, etc)
Assessment of woman’s current social situation including relationship support structures (i.e. father of the baby, parental involvement, etc)
Identification of circumstantial pressures (i.e. finances, education, unsupportive relationships, medical care, child care, age, long-term goals, etc)
Careful exploration of the full range of available options including abortion, birth, and adoption.
Careful consideration of potential short and long-term physical, social, and emotional outcomes of each available alternative.
Maintain a safe environment that helps a woman firmly resist pressure from self-interested parties.
You and I know that the abortion industry has not identified nor do they use proper ethical standards of care when serving women facing unplanned pregnancy. Not necessarily news to you is it? Because of that the likelihood of a woman being victimized by the political and financial interests of those providers is drastically increased. It is unjust and upsetting and reveals an opportunity.
Are You Following Your Standards?
And what about the Pregnancy Resource Center movement? Have we clearly identified proper ethical standards of care for medical services and counseling? For example, let’s say that your Pregnancy Help Clinic provides pregnancy testing. And let’s say a woman comes in who is seriously considering an abortion and your organization provides her with one. Assuming that it takes just 4 minutes for you to get a result on the pregnancy test you decide to ‘counsel’ the woman for 30 or more minutes about the negative aspects of abortion. This could be considered an unethical use of the trust a woman is giving you by withholding critical decision-making information while you offer her what could be considered ‘your agenda’ about what she should do. This is a grey area but could be interpreted as ‘moral entrapment.’ What is the ethical standard you are using to defend the particular way your organization delivers pregnancy tests?
Anytime a group of people interacts with a person or another group of people that interaction should be governed by practical, ethical standards of care. Those standards which could be called ‘normative ethics’ are designed to insure the person or people receiving the service from you because of their distinct need are protected from any harm that could from exposure to the selfish intentions or personal agendas of the people providing the service. You may say, “Since we are Christians and mean only to help a woman considering abortion this is not a problem for us.” To that it must be said, “Abortion providers could also say they have only the best of intentions.” And it is because of the abortion industry’s lack of ethical standards of care we have an opportunity to set a national standard for all organizations serving women facing unintended pregnancy.
But first we must identify them, agree to them, and prove that we follow them in the pregnancy resource center movement. We are not talking about ‘Commitment of Care’ documents. We are talking about something much more specific.
To learn more about developing a system that will help to insure and optimize ethical standards in your Pregnancy Center go to www.compasscaretraining.org.
Its coming . . . more and more attempts to regulate pregnancy centers with State legislation. So far most of them have failed but the abortion industry is getting better at figuring out our internal weaknesses in an effort to limit women’s access to pregnancy centers. Some think that negative regulatory legislation aimed at Pregnancy Centers may happen as early as next year!
All the abortion industry needs is one State to pass restrictive legislation and it could pave the way for other States to follow in their steps. The last thing we want is for the State to begin regulating what Pregnancy Centers do. What we really need is to show the States that we follow standards of our own.
Up until last week Washington State was one of those States. From what I understand the legislation would have made it possible for a woman to sue a pregnancy center ‘for damages’ if she simply did not like what she was told while there. Also, if the Pregnancy Center for some reason were to win the lawsuit it would have made it illegal for them to recover their legal costs from the plaintiff. So not only could they be sued but if they won they would still have to pay for the cost of an expensive lawsuit themselves.
New York Pregnancy Centers have been the target of several pieces of legislation designed to hinder their ability to free speech in marketing as well as limiting their ability to provide limited medical services like ultrasound. In 2006 New York’s Representative Carolyn Maloney introduced a federal bill restricting the free speech of ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ that was actually backed by the ACLU, an organization committed to the broadest interpretation of free speech.
Virginia just a few days ago let a bill die as the legislative session ended for the year without a vote. The idea was to set standards for pregnancy centers to follow informed by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). They even performed an undercover investigation and wrote a report on it (click here to see that report). See their YouTube video about it below.
What is the solution? We need a return to excellence. We need documented ethical standards of our own. Furthermore, we need documented processes outlining the way we serve every pregnant woman including what we say as well as when it is said and by whom. We need to show that the way we provide medical services to women facing unintended pregnancy is the highest and only standard of care and that even abortion-providers should follow our protocols . . . because they are right, they don’t just feel right. Do you know what is being said to each woman when the door to the counseling room is shut? Do you know for sure that your nurses are not using medical tools to intentionally manipulate women’s emotions. Do you know for sure that your counselors are not dispensing any type of information that could be considered medical in nature? Do have people without a medical license running pregnancy tests? What exactly is being said to women when they are scheduled for an appointment? If all you have to go on is one person who says something like, “We have good counselors . . . they would never say anything they are not supposed to say” then you as an executive can be fairly certain you’ve got problem.
Here is the Acid Test to know if your organization is doing the right things in the right way: Everything you do is written down in a book that everyone follows, parts of which are even memorized as scripts. If you can’t point to that book, and I’m NOT talking about a Policy manual, then it is impossible for your organization to consistently meet any ethical standard. If by some stretch of the imagination your organization is so well run that you hit the bull’s eye let’s say for 1 ethical standard you could not prove it in a court of law without that book and the documentation that each person was trained in doing their job exactly according to the book AND that you have documentation that they followed their training with each and every patient. That is standardization.
“But abortionists don’t do that why should we?” you might ask. It is because they don’t regulate themselves that it is imperative we do. Once we have a clear, well thought out, ethical application of information and medical services aimed at helping women facing unplanned pregnancy to make a truly informed decision then we will have the high ground, then we can begin to see legislation drafted and passed regulating the irresponsible, self-interested, unethical abortion industry. But this will take commitment on the part of the executive, a commitment to applying a linear services model, to changing the way things are done. To learn more about implementing a written, linear service model click on the new CompassCare Training Website here: www.compasscaretraining.org
nt women who are seriously considering abortion. The following graph represents typical trends seen in the average PRC. Note that with each step there is approximately a 50% reduction in the number of women who actually qualify to go to the next level of service. Whether your organization is scheduling 1000 appointments or 100 take a look at your trends and see if they are in the ball park with the trends shown in this graph.
