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Anti-abortion counseling leads a Kaiser
facility to end referrals Posted 1-25-99 Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, severed its relationship with a pregnancy counseling agency last week following the disclosure that the agency’s mission is to build the San Francisco Bay Area into"an abortion-free community." For the past year, Kaiser Permanente Oakland referred women who showed ambivalence over their newly discovered pregnancies to First Resort Inc. in Oakland, an abortion counseling facility run by abortion opponents. First Resort CEO Shari Plunkett made the comment about the organization’s mission in an interview that ran recently in the Washington Times. Marge Poush, RN, assistant service manager of ob/gyn at the Oakland facility, said Kaiser originally handled all abortion counseling but the patient volume exceeded the hospital’s counseling capacity. "Previously, we did this service in-house," Poush said. "We began referring these patients to First Resort because we wanted to offer as many services as possible, and First Resort could see as many as we could send." Referrals averaged 15 calls and eight-to-12 visits per month. All but one patient-evaluation form requested by Kaiser was favorable, but the ensuing publicity following publication of the article "led us to re-evaluate," Poush said. "We decided it would be better to bring the counseling back inhouse now." Plunkett was unavailable for comment, but provided NurseWeek with copies of one of her op-ed articles addressing the issue. In the article, she said that abortion rights advocacy organizations hounded Kaiser and apparently threatened a lawsuit and were successful in getting the HMO to cancel the referral program. "Thanks to a daring act of leadership on Kaiser’s part, women in Oakland were able to receive an unprecedented level of attentive, professional counseling on all of their options," Plunkett wrote. "Thanks to a mean-spirited bunch of abortion partisans, they won’t be getting it anymore." Plunkett said First Resort provided counseling, resource information, exams, and ultrasound services. Approximately half of the Kaiser referral patients choose to end their pregnancies, Plunkett wrote. In a prepared statement, Ann Daniels, executive director of the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League pro-choice education fund, called First Resort a "stealth clinic" and said her organization is pleased Kaiser ended its relationship with the counseling center. Related Site |
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