After a new law passed in Connecticut expanding who can commit abortions, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England (PPSNE) is training new abortionists in the state.
According to abortionist Dr. Nancy Stanwood, PPSNE’s chief medical officer, Planned Parenthood began training some of their providers in late summer to commit abortions. “We started our training in the beginning of August and it’s going really well with our first group of cohorts who are learning the skill,” Stanwood said, according to WHSU. “They’re [sic] obviously other components to the training in addition to ‘can you do the procedure.’ We want them to feel totally able to manage. We’re also giving them the other context for safe care and team-based care.”
Planned Parenthood is using the University of California at San Francisco curriculum, which uses fruits to emotionally distance students from the actual procedure; photos showed the two trainees practicing on papayas.
“I can’t necessarily say how many people we need to train. My goal is for us to have a robust workforce of physicians and clinicians who are ready, willing and able to provide care for people who need an aspiration abortion,” Dr. Stanwood said to the CT Mirror. “If I trained 60, and each of them only did a few procedures a year, that’s not a way to maintain skills. We don’t want to over-train. But my goal is to have the workforce that we need, so patients don’t have the current wait time that they do, which is really a pain point for us.”
Two other local abortion businesses have said they will start training non-physicians as well. Both are expecting to begin training outside their organizations as well by the end of the year.
In May of this year, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed a law greatly expanding abortion in the state, and Connecticut began to tout itself as a haven for abortion. In addition, the bill expanded the scope of practice so certain nurse practitioners and physicians assistants could commit abortions. Because Connecticut is a “full practice” state, it’s possible that no physician oversight would be required for abortions in the case of certain advanced practice nurses.
During testimony on the bill, several medical groups expressed hesitation about allowing non-physicians to commit abortions. “There are unintended consequences of simply stating that mid-levels can perform abortions or failing to specify what types of vacuum aspirations can be done,” said the Connecticut State Medical Society in its testimony. “We head down the slippery slope to allowing those procedures that are in fact surgical to be done by mid-level providers, creating patient safety concerns and significant scope of practice issues.”
PPSNE chief medical officer Dr. Stanwood dismissed those concerns, according to the Mirror, stating that “just because you’re a doctor doesn’t mean you know how to do this procedure,” since “it’s really not about what letters come after your name” but only “what training you’ve had.”
Yet as Live Action News reported, PPSNE has been plagued with lawsuits alleging severe medical negligence and a deviation from accepted standards of care.
One advanced practice nurse failed to provide appropriate care and did not notice a patient was 14 or 15 weeks pregnant when inserting her IUD, leading the student to fail to get prenatal care for her preborn son, who suffered from delayed growth and developmental delays.
Another lawsuit alleges that PPSNE had told a patient she miscarried at six weeks and provided her with an abortion pill, but she subsequently delivered a 22-week old baby. Yet another lawsuit alleges that a 2019 abortion resulted in a perforated uterus and perforated bowel requiring an emergency hysterectomy, an emergency bowel resection, and the emergency removal of an ovary and fallopian tube.
