In her 2019 book, pro-choice author Andrea Abrams wrote about her time volunteering at the abortion facility Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women, which is affiliated with Planned Parenthood.
Ironically, Elizabeth Blackwell, known as the first woman in America to earn an MD, was pro-life and would’ve hated that her name was attached to an abortion facility.
Abrams writes about how the cost of an abortion was “a very serious obstacle” for poor women.
When she started working at the facility, abortions were only paid for by Medicaid when there was something wrong with the baby, when the pregnancy resulted from rape, or when the abortion was done for reasons of health.
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Abrams says that when a poor woman came in, “a counselor filled in a form stating that the abortion was necessary to the woman’s mental health in order to obtain coverage for medical assistance.”
In this way, the facility cheated the system and got Medicaid to pay for abortions by claiming they were done for the woman’s “mental health.”
While Abrams was working at the facility, the policy on Medicaid changed. Abortions would only be covered by Medicaid in cases of rape or life endangerment. Abrams writes:
Although everybody was careful not to say it openly, it was instantly apparent that the counselor could tell women about the Medicaid restrictions in a way that would suggest to the woman that she could claim to have been raped, thereby qualifying for medical assistance coverage.
Workers subtly coached women to lie about being raped so their abortions would be covered. Abrams says:
There was no reporting requirement attached to the law at the time. So, when counseling, I could say, “Medical assistance will only pay for abortions that are the result of rape or incest,” and let the woman decide how to proceed from there.
I spoke with one or two women who immediately said that they had been raped. Others were not as quick to pick up on the possibility, or too honest to do so.
While she was working in the abortion facility prompting women to lie about rape, Abrams was volunteering at a Philadelphia rape crisis center called Women Organized Against Rape.
She felt guilty for her actions at the facility. She says, “I was facing a dilemma,” and writes:
At WOAR, it was a core belief that women did not lie about being raped. In fact, the vast majority of rapes were, and still are, not reported. A woman who did report a rape was, in all probability, telling the truth.
But I did not feel like I could counsel women, even indirectly, to say that rape was the cause of their pregnancy if it had not been.
However, I understood the position of women on medical assistance, who were no longer able to use it to pay for an abortion except by making this desperate claim.
Abrams wrestled with what to do.
Finally, she decided to leave. She says, “It was time to stop doing pregnancy and abortion counseling. I could not handle the Medicaid dilemma and felt that stopping altogether was one way to avoid it.”
Abrams says she left the abortion facility “regretfully.”
Although Abrams left, it is possible that workers at the facility continued to coach women to lie after she was gone. There is no way to know how long the practice continued, or if it continues today.
SOURCE: Andrea Abrams Bearing Children: A Memoir of Choices (Independently Published, 2019) 26, 27, 28.
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
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