An issue came up in a Pregnancy Center Leadership discussion group recently that we as executives think about all the time: “How can we reach more pregnant women truly at risk for abortion?” and its sister question, “How can we serve those women in a way that more consistently helps them have their babies?” The particular conversation centered around an executive of a Pregnancy Center in a Midwestern college town feeling like they are not reaching enough abortion-minded women compared to the number of abortions taking place there.

“What exactly leads you to conclude that you actually have a problem?” I asked. “You have made some logical assumptions but your logic is hidden to the rest of us. I am sure you have already figured this out but it would be helpful for the rest of us to get a really good handle on how you arrived at your concern and more importantly what to do about it. Would you be willing to be a little case study for us by answering the following questions for us to chew on? I believe the old adage is true: What gets measured gets fixed. Perhaps we can analyze this as a group of PRC executives in an effort to not only help you but help each other.

1. How many abortions occur in your area annually? 1000

2. How many abortion providers are in your county? 3

3. What is the primary ethnic, age and educational demographic of those women getting abortions? 18-24 Caucasian with 13 years of completed education (sophomore in college)

4. How many appointments did your organization schedule in 2009? 250

5. How many pregnancy tests were performed in 2009? 125

6. How many of those pregnancy tests were positive? 75

7. How many of those positive test patients did you consider to be ‘at risk for an abortion?’ 60

8. How many pregnant, at risk clients can you serve this year? Maybe 460

9. How many of the pregnant at risk patients received an ultrasound their fist visit? 45

10. How many of those said that they were going to continue the pregnancy at the end of their initial appointment? 38

The dream of this executive is to reach 460 pregnant women seriously considering abortion this year. Her initial impression was that all she needed to do was increase her advertising budget. Based on the information she provided if she wanted to reach all 460 women seriously considering abortion in her area using the organization’s current client trends and percentages she would need to filter through 12,000 client appoints per year!

We have found this scenario to represent the typical pregnancy center. What about your pregnancy center? This executive thought that the answer to her low client volume was more advertising. But there is a deeper issue at play. More advertising will only result in more of the same. The approach the center is taking in order to serve the right women in the right way needs  to be streamlined so they can accomplish their goal. (See Case Study of Omaha, NE Pregnancy Center) Otherwise they will be spending precious resources on women who are either not pregnant or not really at risk for abortion. The solution to this service problem lies at the philosophy of ministry that has been adopted. This pregnancy center while using an ultrasound machine is still in the old paradigm of pregnancy center ministry CompassCare coined the Global Service Model or Client-centered approach. In order for them to reach their goal of serving 460 pregnant at risk women they will need to adopt a new paradigm of ministry CompassCare coined the Linear Service Model (LSM).

For information about how to create a linear service model (LSM) to reach and effectively serve abortion-minded women go to www.compasscaretraining.org.

To be accredited means that your organization holds to a set of standards of practice within its own industry. Those standards have to be visible in the daily provision of services in the form of documented process and protocols.

The Washington State legislation that was apparently passed recently provides immunity from liability to abortion providers as well as sets up Planned Parenthood as an accreditation agency. This is a potentially disturbing issue. Making an organization with a subjective, financially vested interest in the abortion business an accreditation agency is the classical ethical conflict of interest. First, it is assumed that the organization has documented standards of care for helping women through the decision-making process knowing full well that if they decide to do anything other than have an abortion the organization looses money and hurts their PR campaign. Second, assuming they have documented standards of care the question becomes whether or not they in line with proper medical and counseling standards. Third, can they actually prove that they uphold their standards on a case by case, patient by patient basis? Fourth, what happens when they are asked to be the accreditation agency for women’s health organizations with differing philosophies of service, say pregnancy centers for instance?

This is a perfect example of how at risk the pregnancy center movement is. If the pregnancy center movement cannot demonstrate that it regulates itself according to current professional codes of ethics in the fields of medicine and counseling/psychology the government will be tempted to create regulation for it. If the movement lets this Washington State legislation pass without identifying and holding to our own documented standards that are in line with current medical and counseling ethics the pregnancy center movement may very well be regulated right out of existence. The best way to meet this challenge is with a comprehensive linear service model.

Click CompassCare Ethical Standards for Organizations Helping Women 6-8-10 for CompassCare’s Standards for Organization’s Helping Women. To know that these standards are being observed in your organization a linear service process is necessary. For more information on a complete linear service model go to CompassCare’s Training website.

Transparency, Integrity, and Full Disclosure:

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)

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.

Update:  See Part IV:  Ethical Standards for Serving Abortion Minded Women.

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