By Dave Andrusko

Time got away from me Tuesday so I was not able to write the companion piece to complement the terrific post we re-ran by Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon who analyzed “The ‘other’ abortion clinics that perform 2/3rds of all abortions.” While the story by Dr. O’Bannon, NRLC’s director of education & research, ran last year, the conclusions and analyses remain spot-on.
My belated story takes as its jumping off point a story entitled “4 Independent Abortion Provider Staffers Open Up About Their Work & What Keeps Them Going.”
Who are the “independent abortion providers”? It’s the abortion clinics that perform roughly 2/3rds of all abortions—essentially all but 5% of the babies not killed by Planned Parenthood.
They joined together as the “Abortion Care Network” to issue a report last year on their work titled “Communities Need Clinics: The Role of Independent Abortion Care Providers in Ensuring Meaningful Access to Abortion Care in the United States.” They’ve issued a new one this year to update their situation.
Bustle’s Madhuri Sathish wrote the adoring post that ran Monday. What do we learn?
First and foremost, don’t forget us. Sure lots of office holders want to defund Planned Parenthood but
they aren’t the only ones facing financial hurdles. According to Sharon Lewis, the executive director of the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, independent abortion clinics often do not have the same visibility or infrastructure that national organizations do, and therefore struggle to secure the funding they need to stay viable.
What else? “Independent clinics serve in areas where there is no Planned Parenthood,” Lewis tells Bustle. “We’re the only abortion provider in our state; there is a Planned Parenthood but they do not provide abortion care.”
As their 2018 report modestly observes, “Although the right to abortion is currently protected in the United States, that right is functionally meaningful only because of independent abortion care providers.” In other words, they see themselves playing Horatius at the Bridge.
Not only will there be occasions where the local Planned Parenthood clinic does not perform abortions, they tell us that they are the ones doing the vast majority of the later abortions your standard Planned Parenthood abortion clinic doesn’t do.
Across the country, 66 percent of clinics that provide abortion after the first trimester are independent. Independent clinics represent 75 percent of all clinics that provide care after 16 weeks of pregnancy, 83 percent of clinics providing care after 19 weeks, and 94 percent of clinics that provide care at or after the 22nd week of pregnancy.
There are two other salient point in Madhuri Sathish’s story.
The first is the enormous importance of the victory of President Trump and continued passage of pro-life legislation at the state level:
Shortly before Trump was elected in 2016, reproductive rights advocates achieved a victory in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the Supreme Court overturned Texas’ 2013 abortion restrictions that passed as part of House Bill 2. But activists barely got a break before Trump won the 2016 election and renewed conservative attacks on abortion access.
“I think it’s just been harder on the staffing level to keep people motivated for the fight,” [Shayla] Walker says. “We just got out of HB2 and we finally got a win and now he takes office and we have to fight again.
The second is that opposition to abortion is not limited to pro-lifers and pro-life officeholders, a reality which wears on “abortion providers.” Here is Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN provider in Alabama, who
tells Bustle that she routinely faces stigma in the South for providing this type of care, which in turn discourages other health care providers in the region from partnering with her. … Robinson says her colleagues at the hospitals she works at often second-guess her decision to perform abortions, while staff morale at her abortion clinic can be low in the face of anti-abortion legislation.
The story ends by mimicking the narrative in “Communities Need Clinics: The Role of Independent Abortion Care Providers in Ensuring Meaningful Access to Abortion Care in the United States—2018 Report,” which combines self-congratulations with barely concealed envy that Planned Parenthood gets all the flattering publicity and the fawning press coverage.
“Really independent providers are the ones on the frontlines, fighting to make abortion available to patients,” Robinson adds. “We’re the ones that are putting our names out there and putting our necks on the line to make sure that the clinics remain viable. … Despite the fact that I don’t have a lot of support, and that it’s not one of the most glamorous parts of the work that I do, it’s still very rewarding because I know how essential it is.”
A better ending is the conclusion to Dr. O’Bannon’s insightful post:
The field of “independent abortion clinics” isn’t populated by saintly, small time community do-gooders but includes enterprises that perform thousands and thousands of abortions annually. The industry still believes that if it their independent abortionists can just get the respect that they deserve, if they can be seen as heroes helping underprivileged women, if they can just get rid of those pesky clinic safety regulations, and if they can get more states to fund their work and more insurance companies to cover their services, they’ll be able to stay in business.
What they fail to see, however, is that the problem isn’t their image, but what they do and to whom. They are not solving women’s problems, just killing their babies and wanting someone to pay for it They are not noble “health care professionals,” but abortionists who kill, not cure.
