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.
The extreme New York abortion deregulation bill we told you about last Thursday, Reproductive Health Act (S5808 (Stewart-Cousins)/A11484 (Glick) The Reproductive Health Act), may come up for a vote in the Senate today. As noted in the above link, “The Reproductive Health Act (RHA), as it is currently being identified, would be the greatest expansion of abortion rights sinceRoe v. Wade. The bill has many flaws, including violation of religious freedoms and removing what few restrictions exist on abortion, ultimately endangering women.”
New Yorkers, please take the following actions:
Call your state representatives today and express your position. If you have already done so, it helps to do it again. Click on the following link for information on your representative’s contact information along with talking points: http://capwiz.com/nycf/callalert/index.tt?alertid=15198041
Forward your circle of influence the above link asking them to contact their representatives too.
Pray that God would enlighten the New York Senate
Stop the Fall
To be clear you are not being asked to defend your rights but the rights of the mute and unfortunate, the rights of the unborn and their mothers. True justice is leveraging the power and influence we have on behalf of those who have none. “The king gives stability to the land by justice, but a man who takes bribes overthrows it” (Proverbs 29.12). New York has an Assembly and now perhaps a Senate full of men and women willing to take a bribe, power in exchange for absolute abortion deregulation. Furthermore, with the legislative session coming to a close in the next day or two without a budget and a $9 Billion deficit their tactic is disgraceful, manipulative, wicked. The only thing that adds value to any economy is people. To pass the most sweeping abortion expansion bill in the history of State legislation in the midst of the largest fiscal crisis the State has ever faced is short sighted at best.
What are the primary virtues of an effective leader and why is virtue in a leader so crucial to a linear service model?
In our initial attempts to ascertain what it was that drove executives that led organizations that performed better than others, what made them so different, we noticed that there were no obvious answers. It was not education or fundraising ability.
Virtuous Leadership and Effective Organizations
We realized that it is not enough that the executive be passionate about helping woman that find themselves in the unfortunate position of having to face an unplanned pregnancy unsupported and alone. Furthermore each executive represented very different levels of management skill compared to other executives who enjoy similar success.
The one thing that emerged that appeared common among executives that lead organizations drastically more effective at reaching and serving women facing unplanned pregnancy is their personal character, the level of mature Christian virtue manifesting in the mundane life of the leader. What also became clear was that system or services do not matter as much as character. The reason for this is because all systems are developed and driven by the innate character of the executive. In thinking about the specific character traits or virtues that represent an effective PRC executive we began to notice that the character traits or virtues were similar. And to a greater or lesser extent these executives manifested the same virtues which influenced virtually all of their behavior thereby setting the tone and expectations for the organizations they lead. This executive influence over time caused the organizations themselves to become more virtuous and consequently more focused, more effective at accomplishing the mission.
Virtue is the basic building block to an effective PRC and emanate from the executive director’s personal commitment to virtuous living. I am speaking of virtue in the classical sense of the word. Those virtues are informed by the Bible and fall into five categories; wisdom, empathy, courage, temperance, and justice. Each virtue has great depth and it is the intention of the following posts to only focus on those aspects of each virtue that make it valuable to the pregnancy center organization.
Check out the results a pregnancy center in Lakeland, FL after the Executive Mary Rutherford implemented a Linear Service Model by clicking here.
After developing the first and only repeatable Linear Service Model for the pregnancy resource center movement many have asked me where the terms came from and what the differences are between a Linear Service Model or LSM and the traditional way a Pregnancy Center operates. Essentially, we started applying the terms in 2004-05 in an attempt to distinguish between what CompassCare had been doing and what we were now doing.
What is the difference anyway?
The definitions in the context of a Pregnancy Center are as follows:
Linear Service Model (LSM): An approach to serving women that focuses on solving the common problem of unplanned pregnancy each woman faces by taking each woman through a consistent, chronological, scripted, step-by-step decision-making process in an effort to answer the right questions in the right order. One of the key assumptions in a good LSM is that the manner in which services are provided is just as important as the services themselves. An LSM standardizes services to women and ensures that those services are provided the same way with each and every patient for the purposes of accountability (which safeguards the organization from attack), and for measurability (which allows for targeted changes to keep the organization on the cutting edge of service). This LSM can also accurately be termed the “Problem-focused Model” as it allows the organization to be an expert at solving a particular problem without having to be an expert at the individual circumstances of each patient/client. This is a more Biblical approach because it is the approach that God in Christ took by solving each person’s sin problem through solving the issue of sin itself on the cross.
Global Service Model (GSM): An approach to serving women that focuses on developing a relationship with each individual client using several different types of services in an effort to provide a place of “unconditional positive regard” an idea first developed by Carl Rogers. This model places the client in the driver’s seat by providing her with a menu board of services from which she can choose, also based on one of Carl Rogers’ ideas known as “Client-centered Therapy.” Each client is served differently at the discretion of client advocate or counselor usually beginning with a client-driven conversation lasting up to an hour. Often the counselor defers to the client as to her abortion-vulnerability rather than an objective assessment of her socio-economic situation which actually is the basis of the pressure to drive a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The counselor then attempts to provide certain types of information to dissuade her from having an abortion. The GSM is based on an unbiblical, modified, secular humanistic counseling model and is difficult to improve primarily because there is no way of accurately assessing the overall performance of the organization when each patient is served differently. Another term that could be used for the GSM is a “Client-centered Model.”
For case studies on centers implementing CompassCare’s Linear Service Model called the Optimization Tool go to www.compasscaretraining.org.
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)
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.
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
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?
