Planned Parenthood under attack

CEO of MN, ND and SD discusses threats to women’s health care provider ahead of visit

This Thursday, following an unprecedented attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado which saw three people lose their lives, the local Planned Parenthood organization will host its 11th annual Progress on the Prairie event with the CEO of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards and Sarah Stoesz, Planned Parenthood director for Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

This event comes as Congress looks at ways to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, and with the state of Texas closing Planned Parenthood clinics and North Dakota continuing its efforts to legally defend anti-abortion laws, in many ways, Planned Parenthood is under attack. We asked Sarah Stoesz about all of these ahead of her visit.

HPR- Let’s start with what happened in Colorado. What did you think when you heard the news?

Sarah Stoesz- I was absolutely shocked when I heard the news but not surprised honestly. The intensity of the anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric has really been ramped up since last July and we have seen more and more protests around the country. We’ve seen the use of more and more inflammatory rhetoric. Frankly, the number of security incidents has been increasing since last July too when these fraudulently created and edited videos were released. A number of us have been saying that if this continues, it was a matter of time before someone was hurt, and now in fact someone was hurt. Of course we’re heartbroken. This is very sad time for the Planned Parenthood family, and we are struggling with our grief over the death of innocent people and the injuries of others even as we are resolved in our determination to continue to do the work that we are doing all across this country.

HPR- This is kind of a strategy by abortion opponents, wouldn’t you say, where they know that abortion is going to be legal and it’s going to stay legal, so they’ve got to reduce access and then also demonize providers. Is that what you think is going on?

SS- Yes, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe vs. Wade. It is highly likely that abortion access will continue to be the law of the land. Those who oppose abortion have been unsuccessful in convincing women that they should not access abortion. Just parenthetically, the rates of abortion don’t vary a lot worldwide. Even in countries where abortion is illegal, the rate of abortion is roughly the same and that indicates that women who are pregnant and don’t want to be pregnant will take whatever steps they need to take to take care of themselves and their families and terminate the pregnancies. So consequently as the opponents of abortion have become more and more frustrated in their inability to convince women not to have abortions, they have turned their attention instead to making abortion very difficult to obtain. That’s why we’ve seen such an increase in the number of legislative actions around the country, we call them trap laws, targeting regulation of abortion providers. These are things, we’ve had them in North Dakota as well, that are aimed at either closing down the clinic, making it very difficult for the clinic to operate or making it difficult for women to access the services. So that’s been their general political tactic.

Now of course since this summer, what we’re also seeing is a major attempt to discredit Planned Parenthood, even though Planned Parenthood is not the only provider of abortion in this country, and I think, as I am sure you know, there’s a clinic in North Dakota in Fargo that has been providing abortions for many, many years and caring for women in North Dakota. So it’s not just Planned Parenthood doing this work. But Planned Parenthood is the symbol of women’s health in this country, including access to abortion, so consequently to damage the symbol of women’s health, to in some way discredit us, in some way to demonize us is something that they think will work for them politically. The other thing that they have been doing is trying to terrorize doctors and convince doctors not to perform abortions, and I would say they have had some degree of success in that regard. Abortion has been pushed out of many clinics and hospitals and into these isolated abortion clinics that Planned Parenthood runs and independent providers run, and I think that’s a real shame and certainly contributes to a stigma of abortion. It would be very helpful if all of the doctors in this country, the vast majority of whom support abortion, would insist that abortion be provided in their clinics or in their hospitals so that abortion was not provided in an isolated setting.

HPR- What do you think can be done to prevent incidents like what happened in Colorado?

SS- At Planned Parenthood and at independent providers too, safety and security is at top of mind every single day. It’s the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to bed. I am absolutely committed to making sure that all of our 19 sites are completely safe and secure, that our patients are safe and that our staff is safe. So what we have done over the years has been to invest fairly heavily in security and we see the results of that in Colorado Springs. There wasn’t a single staff member hurt, there wasn’t a single patient hurt and that’s because the staff there knew exactly what to do, they were highly trained, they’d been drilled repeatedly on protocols, they had a safe room to go to. They knew what to do once they were in that safe room. And the people on the outside knew what to do once they were in that safe room and that was simply to wait, which was for five hours until the siege was over and they were able to come out. I will continue to do what I have been doing for the last 14 years, which is raise as much money as I possibly can to fund security and safety measures for all of our clinics. I believe that our clinics are very, very safe places, but as we saw in Colorado Springs, that did not prevent someone from trying to intrude anyway.

HPR- Have you had threats against clinics here in Minnesota and the Dakotas?

SS- Yes we have in fact.

HPR- You talked about how the videos have created this environment and part of what has gone on now is a push in Congress to cut funding to Planned Parenthood and that fight is ongoing. We’ve even seen where they’ve talked about tying the funding of the government to a vote on cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and making that a big fight, and it seems like they’ve kind of backed off that lately. Can you talk about the ongoing fight in Congress right now over funding Planned Parenthood?

SS- The first thing I want everyone to understand is that I think when we talk about funding for Planned Parenthood, people imagine that there’s some line item in the federal budget that says Planned Parenthood funding and it’s not like that. The reality is that we are healthcare providers, we provide medical services and we are reimbursed for the services that we provide exactly the same way every other healthcare provider in the country, including all of those in North Dakota, is reimbursed.

You know you don’t hear people talking about, for example, funding for Sanford Health because there isn’t a line item similarly for that system in the budget, and yet that hospital and clinic system receives hundreds of millions of dollars, I am quite sure, in Medicaid reimbursement, in Medicare reimbursement, in other forms of public support for patients for services provided. And that’s exactly the way it is at Planned Parenthood: it’s reimbursement for services provided.

So when they talk about cutting off “funding,” what they are talking about is cutting off patients’ ability to access Planned Parenthood using funding that is publicly available to them. So that’s one important distinction that I really think people need to get. The amount of public money that goes to Planned Parenthood is substantially less, it is a teeny weeny, itsy bitsy drop in the bucket, drop in the ocean, let me just say, compared to the “funding” that is given to other health care providers in this country. So that’s point number one.

Point number two is that the Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they will stop at nothing to cut off patient access to Planned Parenthood. Again, just to be crystal clear, no federal funding goes to pay for abortion services. We are talking about non-abortion services, meaning birth control, cancer screenings, well woman checkups, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and so forth, not abortion. Congressional leaders have chosen to say that they want to cut off funding for our patients for two reasons. One, because they are using the excuse of fraudulently produced videos that show absolutely nothing that is truthful and there has never been a single, solitary shred of evidence that is produced by anyone that the things alleged in those videos are true -- they are not true, I will just say that categorically -- so that’s one thing. The other thing that they say is, well, Planned Parenthood must be using public money for abortions, and yet we are audited extensively every single year by outside auditors and to my knowledge there has never been a Planned Parenthood audit in this country that has shown that any public funds have been used to pay for abortions. So again they are creating something, a boogeyman that doesn’t exist, and they’ve never been able to prove it and they never will be able to prove it. So they are using these trumped-up accusations based on lies to try to damage Planned Parenthood both in terms of our reputation and in terms of our ability to provide services.

So the big question is why is Planned Parenthood so threatening to members of Congress and to certain people in this country? What is so scary about Planned Parenthood? I think it’s because we have been providing birth control services and health care services to women for 100 years -- because we not only provide healthcare services that women need but we also advocate for the provision of those services. And we make it very clear that our basic ethical principle is that all women should have an equal place at life’s table, and we know that women cannot have an equal place at life’s table if we cannot control our reproductive destinies. And this idea, in and of itself, used to be very threatening to the right wing in this country, and so consequently the symbolism of what Planned Parenthood does is something that these folks are intent on destroying. They also want to destroy the substance of what we do, which is to provide birth control -- and that’s the vast majority of what we do, by the way. They want to destroy the substance of that because they understand without birth control women can’t be full-fledged autonomous human beings, and again that idea is very threatening.

HPR- Another thing I wanted to talk about is what happened in Texas where you had law enforcement raiding Planned Parenthood clinics and searching for evidence from those videos, which they to this point have produced nothing. But it was just kind of incredible where you saw these law enforcement agencies raiding legal clinics because members of the state government were opposed to it. It made me think, well, North Dakota is a state where the vast majority of state government is opposed to Planned Parenthood, could it happen here?

SS- We think that all across this country, it happened in Texas, where else can it happen? I think the other thing that’s important for everyone to remember is when there is an abuse of power like there was so blatantly demonstrated in Texas against Planned Parenthood, it sets the table for future abuses of power against other organizations which aren’t Planned Parenthood. And so it becomes it even more important for people to stand up and protest that aspect of what has occurred, even if they don’t feel strongly one way or the other about Planned Parenthood.

HPR- And as a result of what happened in Texas, haven’t you seen women who are struggling to find services?

SS- Absolutely we have. In fact, in Texas the rate of unintended pregnancy has doubled just in the last year as the result of the closing down of so many Planned Parenthood clinics, and we’ve seen an epidemic of chlamydia in various communities too and other sexually transmitted infections. The individual consequences that are felt by individual human beings are profound, but so are the public health consequences quite profound. And this is just after one year, so imagine where we are going to be in five years or 10 years if we can’t get these clinics reopened. Planned Parenthood is here for a reason and we operate and provide these services for a reason, and not being able to provide them has real consequences.

HPR- Obviously in North Dakota, we’ve seen efforts to try to close our one abortion clinic. Texas has multiple, and there’s been a big push because they obviously feel if they close the one, it would make North Dakota have zero. But we did see a victory with Measure 1, which was in front of the public, so that helped where they knew these legislators were going too far and being extreme with their legislation. Despite that, we’ve seen recently they are continuing to push the legal effort to defend these laws even though probably a majority of North Dakotans don’t support them.

SS- I think it’s really interesting because we’ve seen that in state after state around the country with these efforts like Measure 1 and others, these things have popped up on ballots around the country, particularly roughly since 2006 which was the first one in South Dakota, and every time they lose and they lose by very big majorities. In fact, as the years go on they lose by larger and larger majorities. In North Dakota, the Measure 1 defeat was two to one. That’s a pretty resounding message that the voters sent to legislators. Stop it, stop trying to restrict and reduce abortion access, we don’t agree with you and we don’t want you to do that. Of course two of the primary proponents of Measure 1 in the Legislature were also defeated, which is a great thing, and as a result of that we did see a pulling back last year during the Legislative session of abortion restriction attempts. So it looks like they might’ve listened a little bit in North Dakota, at least during the session. I don’t know how long it will last. It’s interesting that the people of the country, even in very conservative states that are strongly Republican, still support abortion access, and still some of these right wing politicians can’t resist throwing some red meat to their dwindling political base and taking these actions to try to shut down the clinics.

IF YOU GO:

11th Annual Progress on the Prairie

Thurs, Dec. 3 at 5:30 p.m.

Ecce Art Gallery, 216 N Broadway, Fargo