Learning from an Adversary

Excerpted from an 2017 article worth revisiting by Matt Hadro of the Catholic News Agency.

What pro-life advocates can learn from Planned Parenthood. “The brand of Planned Parenthood is, unfortunately, pretty solid..." said Dr. Jeff Pauls of the Vitae Foundation. Yet many women admitted that they “still weren’t totally comfortable with the experience of having to go there." Planned Parenthood may have a “solid" reputation in the minds of its customers, yet pro-life advocates could serve more of these women if they emulated its strengths, he told CNA.

The Vitae Foundation partnered with Dr. Charles Kenny, an industry leader in “right-brain research" on customers’ loyalty to brands like Coca-Cola and American Express, to investigate what Planned Parenthood’s clients thought of the organization and discover what pro-life pregnancy centers, and supporters could learn from the abortion giant.

They conducted in-depth interviews of over 70 women, many of them from metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles and who “had no idea who did the interview," Pauls noted. Questions asked included when and how women had first heard about Planned Parenthood, why they decided to go there, what they thought about the organization’s brand and health care, and if they had ever heard of a “pregnancy help center."

The "strengths" of the Planned Parenthood brand are a “non-judgmental" appearance of staff workers who help women think they are in “control," providing them feelings of “acceptance" and “freedom," Pauls explained. “It’s a place to get, in their words, to ‘fix a mistake’" and “solve a problem." For instance, clinics did not offer “real counseling" for women considering abortion, “because if they did, it would be an admission that abortion harms women," Pauls said. Rather, clinics focused on “helping women feel alright about abortion, and giving them these defense and coping mechanisms for the inevitable pain and difficulty they go through," he said.

For instance, clinic workers told women of their abortion “you won’t even think about it later on" and “it’s no big deal, women do this all the time." They would encourage them that “it’s actually a good thing that you’re doing for your family or your future family or your education or your career." “A lot of times they’ll even refer to abortion and their need to go to Planned Parenthood as a necessary evil," Pauls said. “She feels like she really has no real choice, so Planned Parenthood is the only way really to move forward without kind of experiencing this death of her current self or her future self."

In contrast, pregnancy centers can step in and offer “holistic" health care that Planned Parenthood doesn’t, Pauls insisted. One significant “surprise" from his research was that “none" of the women “knew what a pregnancy help center was" or had “much knowledge or interest in it." This was despite the fact that 2,400 pregnancy help centers outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics almost four to one. These pregnancy clinics don’t perform abortions but instead provide women financial, material and emotional support to have their baby and can even offer medical care and psychological counseling.

“Women are interested in this holistic approach to health,” of “being healthy in mind, body, spirit, soul, vocation,” Pauls said. The care in pregnancy help centers is “not just physical, which is what Planned Parenthood does. Their goal is to make them un-pregnant and send them back out into a risky lifestyle, to have them come back and do it all over again.” Many pregnancy centers are “connected with a medical model or a medical referral system where they can address the physical, psychological, emotional, social, intellectual, and vocational health needs of the woman,” he said.

Pro-life advacates can be the positive alternative to Planned Parenthood's "brand": offering instead a path to genuine freedom, truly supportive non-judgemental problem solving, and loving acceptance of both mother and child.

Read the original article on the Catholic News Agency website.