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The Problem with Planned Parenthood
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/the-problem-with-planned-parenthoodLong before Roe was overturned, providers’ desire to avoid risk—from professional ostracization to picketing to shootings—shadowed abortion care. This is why medical schools often refrained from offering training in terminating pregnancies, and why abortion procedures were not regularly performed in the vast majority of public hospitals. Since Dobbs, some medical institutions have gone further, hesitating to provide care to women such as Christina Zielke, who was rushed to a hospital in Painesville, Ohio, last September after experiencing heavy bleeding from a miscarriage. Instead of performing a dilation-and-curettage procedure to remove the pregnancy tissue from her uterus, the hospital staff discharged Zielke, apparently in response to a six-week abortion ban that had been passed by the Ohio state legislature. Zielke was soon lying in a bathtub in a pool of blood, wondering if she would die. After she lost consciousness, her family called 911, and paramedics eventually took her back to the hospital, where a doctor performed the procedure.
Such horror stories are a predictable consequence of the fear that criminalizing abortion has spread through the medical community. For fifty years, Roe protected providers from legal risks like the ones taken on by the Jane Collective, an underground network of women in Chicago. Collective members arranged more than eleven thousand illegal abortions in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, until a team of detectives raided their makeshift clinic and charged them with multiple counts of “conspiracy to commit abortion.” (Just before their cases went to trial, the Supreme Court legalized abortion.) Arguably, providers face greater legal dangers now than they did before Roe. Carole Joffe, a sociologist who has written about the history of abortion, told me that doctors who performed illegal procedures in the past “typically received sentences of a few years,” whereas physicians today face “an aggressive anti-abortion movement that, in some states, is calling for life imprisonment.” Abortion opponents have also targeted organizations such as Planned Parenthood with spurious lawsuits and violent attacks, in an effort to shut them down.
Planned Parenthood’s motto is “Care. No matter what.” These words suggest an uncompromising commitment to serving patients. Yet some pro-choice advocates feel that the group, along with other large organizations that have shaped the modern abortion-rights movement, has lately seemed more focussed on self-preservation than on taking bold risks. Tracy Weitz, a reproductive-rights scholar who directs the Center on Health, Risk, and Society, at American University, told me she is worried that these groups are being guided too strongly by attorneys whose priority is to shield them from lawsuits. The mission of Planned Parenthood is not “institutional survival,” Weitz said. “Their entire goal, their mission, is to serve patients.” If caution supersedes this goal, she warns, not only will patients suffer but the pro-choice movement will fall into a familiar trap. “One of the critiques of the abortion-rights movement is that we put too much faith in the law, believing that it would protect the right to abortion,” she said. “I think it’s ironic that all of a sudden we have turned over this movement to a whole new group of lawyers—not constitutional lawyers but risk managers.”
Such horror stories are a predictable consequence of the fear that criminalizing abortion has spread through the medical community. For fifty years, Roe protected providers from legal risks like the ones taken on by the Jane Collective, an underground network of women in Chicago. Collective members arranged more than eleven thousand illegal abortions in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, until a team of detectives raided their makeshift clinic and charged them with multiple counts of “conspiracy to commit abortion.” (Just before their cases went to trial, the Supreme Court legalized abortion.) Arguably, providers face greater legal dangers now than they did before Roe. Carole Joffe, a sociologist who has written about the history of abortion, told me that doctors who performed illegal procedures in the past “typically received sentences of a few years,” whereas physicians today face “an aggressive anti-abortion movement that, in some states, is calling for life imprisonment.” Abortion opponents have also targeted organizations such as Planned Parenthood with spurious lawsuits and violent attacks, in an effort to shut them down.
Planned Parenthood’s motto is “Care. No matter what.” These words suggest an uncompromising commitment to serving patients. Yet some pro-choice advocates feel that the group, along with other large organizations that have shaped the modern abortion-rights movement, has lately seemed more focussed on self-preservation than on taking bold risks. Tracy Weitz, a reproductive-rights scholar who directs the Center on Health, Risk, and Society, at American University, told me she is worried that these groups are being guided too strongly by attorneys whose priority is to shield them from lawsuits. The mission of Planned Parenthood is not “institutional survival,” Weitz said. “Their entire goal, their mission, is to serve patients.” If caution supersedes this goal, she warns, not only will patients suffer but the pro-choice movement will fall into a familiar trap. “One of the critiques of the abortion-rights movement is that we put too much faith in the law, believing that it would protect the right to abortion,” she said. “I think it’s ironic that all of a sudden we have turned over this movement to a whole new group of lawyers—not constitutional lawyers but risk managers.”
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