Pro-abortion author admits Planned Parenthood gave poor counseling

Jennifer Baumgardner is a pro-abortion writer and the creator of the t-shirt campaign “I Had An Abortion.” She attempted to start a movement calling for women across the nation to wear shirts announcing their past abortions in order to attempt to normalize abortion and defeat its stigma. The campaign was not very successful, however, because fewer than the expected number of women purchased the shirts. Apparently, not many women wanted to joyfully advertise the deaths of their babies.

In Baumgardner’s pro-abortion book Abortion & Life, she shares the photos and stories of a small number of women who did agree to wear the shirts.  One story contains the following first-hand account of the “counseling” a woman received at Planned Parenthood.

When a pro-abortion book by a pro-abortion author includes a testimony that demonstrates how deficient Planned Parenthood’s counseling is, it must really be bad.

Many other women have spoken out about the poor “counseling‘ they received at Planned Parenthood. This “counseling,” at the very least, was limited and rushed, and at its worst, amounted to a sales pitch for abortion. Even more damning are admissions by former Planned Parenthood workers that they pressured women into abortions by presenting a one-sided picture.

Lavonne Wilenken, a former Planned Parenthood worker, gave the following testimony in the book Bad Choices: A Look inside Planned Parenthood:

But rushed and biased counseling is not limited to Planned Parenthood. Researcher David Reardon, in his book Aborted Women: Silent No More, surveyed over 250 post-abortive women about the counseling they received at abortion facilities. The results are alarming.

• 66% said their counselor’s advice was biased

• 40 to 60% described themselves as not having been certain of their decision prior to counseling

• 44% stated they were actively hoping to find an option other than abortion during counseling

• 5% reported that they were encouraged to ask questions

• 52 to 71% felt the questions were inadequately answered, sidestepped, or trivialized

• 90% said they were not given enough information to make an informed decision

• 83% said it was very likely that they would’ve chosen differently if they had not been so strongly encouraged to abort by others, including their abortion counselors

And according to Reardon:

It is unlikely that Planned Parenthood told the abortion patient that at just under eight weeks her baby had hands and feet, with fingers and toes, or that her baby had a beating heart and brainwaves. Was she told that having an abortion would increase her risk of breast cancer (according to twelve out of twelve recent studies)? Was she told that a woman who has an abortion is left with a greater risk of suicide (up to six to seven times greater, according to two studies)? Or that abortion could lead to a 65% increased risk of depression? It is possible that the woman who told her story in Abortion & Life had no knowledge of these statistics and facts.

Beyond the abortion workers’ reluctance to tell a woman anything that might make her back out of her abortion, there is also the fact that counseling takes up time and slows things down, reducing the number of abortions that can be done — meaning fewer abortions can be performed and less money can be made. And with Planned Parenthood currently performing an average of one abortion every 97 seconds, time is money for them:

Debunking Planned Parenthood's "3%" Abortion Myth

Pro-choice author Carole Joffe interviewed abortion clinic workers for her book The Regulation of Sexuality: Experiences of Family-Planning Workers. She says:

Even pro-abortion writers acknowledge that abortion facilities in general (and Planned Parenthood in particular) do not offer good “counseling” before abortions.

Source: Jennifer Baumgardner Abortion & Life  (New York: Akashic Books, 2008)  127