Hickey: Pitt Student Health’s referrals for reproductive services need standards

The stated purpose of the medical clinics behind imissedmyperiod.com is to “help you get all the facts before you decide whether an abortion is right for you.” For the clinics behind mypregnancycenter.org, their goal is to “empower abortion-vulnerable women to choose life.”

To me, those sound like two different missions, and Women’s Choice Network — the organization represented by both websites — sounds like a misleading name for an organization whose ultimate goal is to convince women to carry their pregnancies to term. But Amy Scheuring, the clinics’ executive director, says there’s nothing deceitful about her clinics.

“We’ve been open 26 years,” she told me over the phone, “and what we hear from women is ‘I had to get an abortion because I had no choice.’ We were hearing that over and over again, so we felt like somebody in our community should be opening the door for a different choice because if [abortion] is the only choice you have, that’s a slim menu to choose from. We intentionally use that word [choice] because we really want to make sure people understand there is a choice for life, and it’s much more doable than a woman thinks.”

Each clinic belonging to the Women’s Choice Network exemplifies a crisis pregnancy center — a type of pro-life clinic. Scheuring dislikes the term pro-life because she feels it misrepresents their mission as political, but I think it accurately describes her organization’s belief that abortion is a preventable tragedy. They seek to intercept abortion-minded women and convince them that giving birth would be the better choice. Supporters insist that these clinics save lives and provide compassionate care to women who otherwise would have been traumatized by their abortions; opponents argue that they often provide misleading information about the effectiveness of birth control, exaggerate the physical and mental risks of abortion, and in some extreme cases, entrust the care of their clients to volunteers without medical backgrounds.

In any case, it seems like a contradiction that Pitt — whose Student Health staff is largely pro-choice and aggressively pro-safer sex — has resource packets sitting in the Student Health waiting room that advertise the Women’s Choice Network as a chain of sexual health clinics alongside the more obviously named crisis pregnancy centers run by the Bethany Christian Services . I’ve asked doctors about the inclusion during multiple appointments at Student Health, but their answers weren’t satisfying. On behalf of the University, Pitt Director of News John Fedele told me that “most literature on display focuses on wellness, flu, etc.,” and “we are not familiar with the Women’s Choice Network.”

The doctors I’ve seen at Student Health have prided themselves on their referrals when they couldn’t provide a service themselves. And Student Health does provide most of the sexual health services you might find yourself in need of, including free STD testing, birth control consultations, emergency contraception and one free pregnancy test per semester. But that doesn’t change the fact that with sexual healthcare as politicized as it is today, Pitt needs to establish and follow a clear policy for determining where it will and will not refer students. And advertising a clinic through resource materials distributed in your office is an implicit referral.

I don’t mind if Pitt wants to refer students to pro-life health centers, as long as Pitt has established a reasonable standard — competent medical staff, up-to-date information, honesty and respect toward clients and good reviews from students who have gone there for services — and found that those clinics live up to that standard. I would also prefer if Pitt made a point to reveal the goals and agendas of the clinics it recommends. That way, students with strong objections to abortion or who feel, as Amy Scheuring describes, “as though they aren’t being given a real choice,” could choose to seek pregnancy and STD testing at clinics that don’t provide abortion services — like those of the Women’s Choice Network. Students who want to seriously consider abortion as an option could go to Planned Parenthood, which provides many of the same services advertised by local crisis pregnancy centers, including options counseling for women who are uncertain about whether or not to terminate their pregnancy and post-abortion counseling from a pro-choice perspective to help women cope with the wide variety of emotions they might experience after the procedure.

With its power to grant or withhold approval from off-campus clinics, Pitt’s health center has a major opportunity to empower students to make the best choices for their own health, while giving them the tools to be smart shoppers when they choose healthcare providers after graduation. But passive endorsements without solid reasoning do the exact opposite, and a student who has a bad experience with a provider that Pitt advertised could be left feeling like she can’t trust her school.

Write Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu. Read more by Tracey on her blog, Going Mental, at www.traceyhickey.wordpress.com.