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Serving the Underserved: How St. JPII Life Center Fills the Gap

Over the next few months, Biking for Babies will highlight our pregnancy resource center partners. If you are in close proximity to a center, we invite you to volunteer your time or gifts, to join them on the front line of the pro-life movement, to save lives. If you know someone who could benefit from the resources and support of this center, forward this blog post to them. God bless!


This article is written by Jane Thomas, first-year rider on the Eastern Route.

Victoria and Sophia, JPII Life Center's clients
Victoria and Sophia, JPII Life Center’s clients

I know a medical student who used to work at Planned Parenthood. She once mentioned to me that sometimes young women—often teenagers and very often Latinas—would come into the Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test even though they would not consider abortion. With the pro-life influence of Catholicism so prominent among Latino families “they just needed to know.” Although my friend remains pro-choice, our discussion prompted her to wonder aloud, what, if anything, we as healthcare providers can do to help such women. While she certainly made every effort to connect any woman planning to continue a pregnancy to “prenatal care and healthy next steps,” the fact is that such resources vary dramatically throughout the country, especially for women who are poor, uninsured, or have tenuous/illegal immigration status. For a developed country, the U.S. has shockingly high maternal and infant mortality rates, and the reality is that pro-life poor in the position of unplanned pregnancies bear the brunt of prenatal healthcare and maternal mortality disparities.

Poor, Latina, immigrant women are one set among a broader demographic of women who face pregnancies while under difficult financial and social circumstances, yet for whom neither adoption nor abortion are palatable options. For medical providers in California—my home state and the home of Stanford, where I’m headed for medical school this fall—as well as Texas and other states with large Latino populations, practicing culturally competent care and meeting the needs of these patient populations compassionately and efficaciously means having something substantive to say and offer to pro-life patients who walk through the doors of our medical practices pregnant and afraid. A pat on the back and a mumbled “good luck—that sounds really hard” just aren’t going to cut it.

Of course, women of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds can find themselves in the position of an unplanned pregnancy. I have a close friend who got an abortion while at Harvard and later came to grieve the decision to terminate, even though she remains philosophically pro-choice in outlook, and another who contemplated an abortion while in a PhD program. These opportunities to bear witness to pain—even though the outcomes were different—showed me that whether a woman is pro-choice or not, she may secretly wish that just one person would say, “You know, you don’t have to get an abortion” even as it seems that everyone else in her life thinks keeping the baby would be immature and irresponsible: “How will you finish graduate school?!” There is more we can do for these women, too. But truth be told, the demographic that keeps me up at night are the pro-life poor in the position of unplanned pregnancies.

Currently, Pregnancy Resource Centers (PRCs) stand in the gap to meet this need, offering highly in-demand and urgent services to women and families facing unexpected pregnancies. Although the precise range of services varies with funding and ability, in general PRCs offer prenatal care, parenting classes, and material support like diapers and car seats to women and families. One excellent example of a PRC that Biking for Babies supports is the St. John Paul II Life Center in Austin, TX which provides free sonograms and counseling for expectant mothers, and has two full-time Ob-Gyns under their umbrella. An Ob-Gyn is a physician trained to provide services ranging from STD testing and pap smears to prenatal care, medical care for high-risk pregnancies, labor & delivery, and emergency cesarians during childbirth.

Carissa and Victoria
Carissa and Victoria

Last week I spoke on the phone for over an hour with Natalie Mohr, Volunteer Manager of the JP II Life Center about the work that the center does, their affiliation with Vitae (an infertility clinic that operates according to Catholic moral teachings), their funding sources, sonogram technology, and approaches to respectful and kind counseling. Natalie emphasized that the counseling is intentionally secular in nature. Although they do run a “spiritual companionship” program that women can sign up for if they want, the volunteers and employees are careful to never press religion or spirituality onto someone who does not welcome it. In addition to culturally appropriate emotional support, I was heartened to hear Natalie discuss the breadth and depth of healthcare and quality of patient-provider relationships at the JP II Life Center. The scope of women’s and reproductive health services that the center offers is impressive and more longitudinal than the range of resources most Ob-Gyn medical practices are equipped to offer.

The JP II Life Center teaches women charting and NaPro (Natural Procreative) methods of natural family planning, provides obstetric care, offers childrearing classes, and donates material support like strollers, Pack ’n Play play yards, diapers, baby food, and breast pumps to the families who most need them. Items that donors contribute to the center (diapers, wipes, formula, clothes, food, and the like) are available for free from “Gianna’s Closet” with no hoops to jump through whatsoever. Families can earn points to obtain brand-new, purchased-on-demand items like carseats and strollers by attending free classes and workshops covering topics such as single parenting, birthing, newborn care, baby health and safety, and raising emotionally healthy children—just to name a smattering of those on the calendar for April alone.

But these services aren’t free: a sonogram costs $400 per woman, one month’s budget for Gianna’s Closet is $1250, and the full suite of Ob-Gyn care for one crisis client comes in at $6500, while Google ads (to help women hear about the center) cost $11 per hour and printing 500 Brochures tallies in at $84. Although the JP II Life Center receives a small amount of government funding, the vast majority of their operating costs are covered by grants and donors who make a decision to financially support the enterprise.

Natalie impressed upon me the importance of always, always treating every woman who comes through the door with respect and dignity, which includes painstakingly avoiding tricking anyone into coming to their center in search of an abortion. I mean, let’s be real, their name is the St. John Paul II Life Center—no fooling anyone into thinking that’s an abortion clinic. But for the women who do walk through the doors, the services that the JP II Life Center offers are highly sought-after and much-needed, and that includes the Vitae infertility clinic, which helps families that want to conceive naturally become pregnant. As a matter of fact, there are even women who utilize their services who aren’t Catholic, pro-life, or anti-contraception at all, but are simply in search of natural, body-positive alternatives to hormonal birth control or expensive, hormone and procedure-based methods of conceiving like In-Vitro Fertilization. Many of these women aren’t conservative in the least, but are more of the kale-eating, Birkenstock-wearing health-nut variety. But besides the Vitae clients in search of the best possible option for the health of them and their families, most clients at the affiliated JP II Life Center are in search of just basic women’s healthcare and financial support.

Picture1As the number of Latino immigrants in the U.S. continues to grow, practicing culturally competent medicine will increasingly entail working with a large number of Catholic and Catholic-influenced patients. For the vast majority of these, even those who are not currently practicing Catholics or do not consider themselves to be “pro-life” so far as political allegiance goes, Catholicism influences the way they think about birth control, reproductive health, abortion, etc. For healthcare providers to anticipate, understand, and offer meaningful support in making decisions at all life stages, it is imperative to possess at least a basic understanding of the spiritual, religious, moral, and social forces shaping these patients’ views of the services that well-meaning providers offer to them—whether that be birth control, tubal ligation, in-vitro fertilization, or abortion. The truth of the matter is, what might seem like “just a medical procedure” to one patient or provider, could be the cause of emotional and moral crisis for another.

At least in the liberal parts of the country where I have lived (California and Massachusetts), there appears to be a mismatch between the providers and the patient population when it comes to attitudes about abortion and reproductive health. While it might sound strange to say that “pro-life Catholics” are an underrepresented minority in medicine, I think it’s really true. Finding a supportive physician, especially an Ob-Gyn, can be daunting even for a white, English-speaking, well-educated family wishing to follow Catholic teachings on sexuality. I can’t even imagine how intimidating and daunting it must be for someone with reduced English language proficiency, a wholly different cultural background, or tenuous immigration status.

Besides this, many Latino immigrants come from countries where the culture around medicine places physicians in a greater position of authority, such that understanding and speaking up—which are already challenging in a healthcare setting for those with low English proficiency—become even more challenging. When I took a Spanish/English medical interpretation class, I learned that American physicians who are used to working with patients that assume they have ultimately autonomy over their healthcare decisions and readily voice their opinions might then assume that a smile and nod means consent when it actually means, “Huh?” My medical interpretation instructor told a story of calling to confirm an appointment for a hysterectomy—a major, invasive surgery to remove the uterus—scheduled for the very next day and was shocked to learn that the woman, who had signed all the “informed consent” paperwork, had no idea that she was scheduled for surgery of any kind and simply believed that she was coming back in for a follow-up. Clearly, something was lost in translation. But even in less extreme cases, the power, language, culture gap between the patient and the provider can still be broad—a known factor in worsening patient outcomes—and the risk of accidentally steam-rolling someone’s cherished religious beliefs out of ignorance is all too high.

So praise be to God for the Pregnancy Resource Centers that stand in the gap, striving to meet this need and offer meaningful love and support to those who choose to take the longer, harder, less convenient path of keeping the baby.


 

St. John Paull II Life Center in Austin, TX

Phone: (512) 407-2900