By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — A budding consortium of pro-life help centers has “a gold seal of approval” to confer for facilities that qualify to become certified with Pro Women’s Healthcare Centers, the consortium’s executive director told the monthly meeting of the Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix (CMAP).
Christine Accurso told the meeting at the headquarters of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix on March 2 that the aim is to “raise the bar, and raise the volume, on what excellent women’s health care is.”
A slide she projected onto a screen said the consortium members want “to partner with women to provide comprehensive, convenient, compassionate, high-quality medical services and access to social services that empower them to care for their health.”
A booklet that Accurso distributed to the audience said the centers “welcome collaboration with many faiths, denominations, and community groups willing to cooperate in pro-life work.”
It added, “We believe that, in some ways, the medical field’s current approach to women’s health has drifted from the Hippocratic Oath, and, in certain practices, departed from being medicine that truly helps the women served.”
Accurso told the meeting, “No health-care provider can ever say there’s no spiritual aspect to a human being.”
Certified centers already are in Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and California, according to the organization’s website, www.pwhcenters.org.
The consortium arose, Accurso told The Wanderer, after an initial phone call “on how we could unite . . . to support one another,” because doctors and providers “have a difficult time pushing up against” what’s considered the mainstream.
“Health care is about restoring the body,” but contraception has nothing to do with that, she said.
After a presentation was made during March for Life events in the nation’s capital in January, 143 pro-life centers have expressed interest in the consortium, Accurso told the CMAP audience, adding that there’s a $495 fee per year for certification.
One woman in the audience spoke up to suggest that the consortium is an idea that “could grow exponentially, in Europe and around the world.”
The PWHC booklet is illustrated with the gold seal of certification that the organization awards, and lists a number of standards it either requires or encourages — the latter being considered desirable but not mandatory.
For instance, a center is required to be open at least 25 hours-plus in a week, while it’s encouraged to offer medical services during a majority of its open hours and outside the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Also, it’s required to offer abortion healing and a practice of spiritual reflection or meditation, while encouraged to provide a quiet meditative space and prayer with patients when appropriate.
Medical services required include prenatal care, well-woman exams, STD testing and treatment, depression/anxiety screening, miscarriage support kits, abortion-pill reversal and alcohol, tobacco, or other drug-use screening, while encouraged services include fertility-awareness instruction and men’s fertility testing and supplies.
The booklet says the PWHC consortium “seeks to make its own unique contribution to the overall (pro-life) movement by uniting pro-life comprehensive medical centers under a common standard of excellence.”
It added: “Abortion is not women’s health care because of the damage it causes to women’s physical and emotional health and the destruction of unborn life, many of whom are females. Abortion is usually something women turn to when they feel they do not have another choice. This is a tragedy and the opposite of choice and empowerment.
“Pro Women’s Healthcare Centers provide the possibility for women to receive the medical and comprehensive care they need in order to feel motherhood or adoption is plausible for them,” the booklet said.
The booklet quoted Donna Harrison, MD, executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that the PWH centers provide a “Hippocratic, woman-centered approach to medical management . . . needed to counter the tremendous push for abortion.”
Abortion Is Not Health Care
Expressing hopes for the consortium’s expansion, Accurso told the CMAP meeting that if a woman in Maine wants to use this service, she’d have to travel as far as Virginia, and that’s not fair to her.
She said Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director who became a pro-life leader, has great work done through her “And Then There Were None” program to aid abortion workers in leaving that sort of employment and starting a new life (abortionworker.com).
A video at the site shows Johnson saying that leaving the abortion industry is harder than simply walking away from a job at a fast-food restaurant because it has a hold on them, but And Then There Were None provides financial assistance and transitional help to support them taking that step.
Accurso said that after going through the healing process upon exiting abortion-clinic work, the worker might even find a new job at a PWH center.
After Accurso concluded her presentation, the CMAP president, Thomas Shellenberger, MD, told the audience that abortion, sterilization, and contraception “are not health care.”
Accurso also is practice administrator of Morning Star Ob/Gyn in suburban Gilbert, Ariz., and a former executive director of the First Way Pregnancy Center in Phoenix.
The CMAP monthly program followed its usual schedule of an hour’s Eucharistic adoration and opportunity for Confession in the diocesan headquarters’ chapel, followed by Mass, a lunch, and the day’s speaker or topic.
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