After working in a prominent position at Planned Parenthood facility in Central Texas for over eight years, I can say that women deserve better than Planned Parenthood and that their funding should be reallocated to Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC).
Planned Parenthood has about 650 facilities nationwide, all of which provide very limited care to their patients.
{mosads}Yet there are over 13,000 non-abortion providing Federally Qualified Health Centers that provide whole health care to women and their families. And that number doesn’t include the tens of thousands of private and group physicians that accept government subsidy programs like Medicaid.
Women are not desperate to find health care clinics, and they won’t be even without Planned Parenthood. In fact, the only thing Planned Parenthood provides that these other facilities do not is abortion.
Should Planned Parenthood be defunded, women will still have access to great quality healthcare. Speaking as a former Planned Parenthood director, I know that quality health care is best provided outside of Planned Parenthood.
If Planned Parenthood were defunded, the $528 million in taxpayer dollars they receive — more than half a billion dollars — would be re-allocated to FQHCs — facilities that can actually care for all of the needs of women.
Women are better off going to other facilities like FQHCs in the first place.
Planned Parenthood claims to offer a wide-variety of services, but they actually fall short in many areas. For instance, not a single Planned Parenthood facility provides mammograms, and Planned Parenthood employees say that they do not provide prenatal care.
If a woman goes to Planned Parenthood for birth control and discovers in the course of her visit that she has high blood pressure, Planned Parenthood can’t help her, she has to be referred to a FQHC for treatment.
Planned Parenthood bills itself as serving low income women. Low-income women often have limited resources including limited access to childcare and transportation.
But Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide all of the services these women need and often end up wasting more of their time and resources because they end up referred elsewhere. If we truly care about women, we should desire they be seen by comprehensive centers that are able to focus on whole women’s health.
Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in America and currently receives over $500 million in taxpayer funding, despite that nearly 8 out of 10 Americans support substantial restrictions on abortion.
Planned Parenthood claims that not a single dollar of that goes to abortion, as it is illegal under the Hyde Amendment, but that doesn’t stop Planned Parenthood from making abortion a core part of its business model, providing about 31 percent of all abortions in the United States.
Planned Parenthood is so abortion-centric that they have begun cutting “health care” services at some clinics, making them “abortion-only” facilities, including one in Madison, Wis.
After leaving Planned Parenthood, I started an organization, And Then There Were None, to help other abortion clinic workers leave the industry to find more fulfilling jobs. So far, 330 former workers have come through our program.
One of our former workers, Rhyan, recently left the Planned Parenthood Overland Park, Kan., which only offers abortions and pregnancy tests.
Rhyan told us that while working for Planned Parenthood, she had been instructed multiple times she should work to “increase their revenue” inside the clinic. “We were told that we needed to push abortion services, as that was the service that generated the most income,” says Rhyan.
Abortion-only clinics have become Planned Parenthood’s new business model because pap smears and birth control do not drive revenue.
It seems that this abortion-centric business model has gone so far that Planned Parenthood has stopped providing healthcare to low-income women and are now solely focused on their bottom line.
The affiliate I worked for, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast lost money on family planning services, so we were encouraged to push abortion over any other service.
Testifying before Congress in 2015, a former facility director for Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, Sue Thayer, echoed these concerns, saying Planned Parenthood “is more concerned about its bottom line than it is about the health and safety of women.”
As sinister as it sounds, this is what I witnessed on the inside of Planned Parenthood and their facts and figures only back this up.
It’s time for Planned Parenthood to be defunded and for those funds to be reallocated to Federally Qualified Health Centers, clinics that actually provide whole women’s healthcare.
Abby Johnson is a former Planned Parenthood Director and founder of And Then There Were None, a registered nonprofit organization that exists to help abortion clinic workers leave the abortion industry.
The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.