What will happen to abortion when Roe v. Wade is overturned? That’s the question on the minds of millions of women, abortion activism groups, and legions of lawyers. But the abortion industry will not be caught off guard. They have been planning for this exact scenario for years.
I know because I was helping them to plan for the day when Roe would be struck down, the right to an abortion at any time during a pregnancy for whatever reason.
The day after Roe, abortion will not be illegal in our country. Abortion laws will simply be left up to the states. However, the abortion industry will have to contend with a possible drop in the most lucrative part of their business due to laws already on the books that are restrictive on abortion.
When I was at Planned Parenthood, we had dozens of protocols, on everything from billing to counseling to donations to medications. As the director of my own Planned Parenthood, I needed to know them all and it was nearly mind-numbingly boring, except for one of them.
Buried all the way in the back of our protocol list was one called “miscarriage management”. This was the protocol that Planned Parenthood had created just in case Roe v. Wade was overturned and for some reason, women couldn’t immediately walk in to receive an elective abortion.
The protocol was lengthy – three pages in total. After all, abortion is what Planned Parenthood does. The nonprofit could not survive if they couldn’t charge patients for expensive abortions.
So here is what my abortion clinic – and the hundreds of others under Planned Parenthood management – will do if abortion is made illegal: they will instruct expectant women on medications, many of which can be bought online, and dosage to ingest that will end their pregnancy. The women will be given warning signs to watch for, just in case the at-home termination doesn’t go as planned and the woman needs to go to the emergency room.
But if everything happens as planned, the woman will be instructed to come into Planned Parenthood for an ultrasound to confirm fetal demise and an MVA (Manual Vacuum Aspiration). Technically, this is not an abortion since the death of the child happened outside of the abortion clinic.
“Miscarriage management” isn’t free though. There are fees associated with this kind of “care,” a loosely used term when it comes to circumventing women’s health.
The one part of miscarriage management that is missing is other options besides abortion for these women. There is no directive for how to counsel a woman on adoption or give her prenatal care. Planned Parenthood could conceivably take the opportunity to help women and become centers where women are empowered: where they are told “yes, you can do this and here’s how” instead of “drink something dangerous to fix your problem.”
But just as it doesn’t do that now, Planned Parenthood won’t do that. They need to figure out a way to stay financially viable while continuing to offer abortion, their cash cow, even that means helping women to harm themselves.
If that miscarriage management protocol is implemented, abortion supporters will be correct when they declare that women are dying from “illegal abortions.” But it won’t be because of the pro-life movement; it will be because the abortion industry is dead set on profiting off vulnerable women.
According to Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports, they have closed 36 percent of their clinics since 1995. Budgeting was always a topic of great importance when I managed the Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas. We never had enough money and we were given abortion quotas to fill the gaps. Planned Parenthood will get creative when Roe is overturned, but the pro-life movement needs to step up in even greater numbers to help women facing unplanned and crisis pregnancies.
Women deserve better than “miscarriage management” and profit-based abortion services.
Abby Johnson is president of And Then There Were None and author of “Unplanned.”
