How abortion opponents bought a Va. abortion clinic to deceive women

February 4, 2016 10:56 AM

How abortion opponents secretly bought a Va. abortion clinic to deceive women. (WaPost) Just five minutes after signing the final papers at closing, the doctor called her office to check her messages. “Triple A Women for Choice,” a voice answered. The doctor thought she made a mistake and redialed. “Triple A Women for Choice,” the voice said again. Whoever bought her practice had the phones forwarded to the pregnancy center within minutes of the sale, before the lawyers even had a chance to close their briefcases.
posted by OmieWise (48 comments total)

I went to college with the author of that article, and I am a little surprised she didn't tear down Triple A with her bare fucking hands.
posted by Etrigan at 11:04 AM on February 4, 2016 [43 favorites]

Shameful and disgusting. In any country that handled abortion in a sane manner, such outright fraud would be illegal.
posted by Bromius at 11:07 AM on February 4, 2016 [24 favorites]

Isn't there some HIPAA angle an enterprising legal eagle could use against these guys? Or is the fact that they're not actually healthcare providers by any measure mean that they're, sadly, exempt from any penalties thereunder?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:08 AM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

Laws or no, they will have to answer to their God for being such unrepentant liars.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:22 AM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

According to the article, "When women call, “they ask lots of intimate, personal, medical questions” she said. And because they aren’t real health-care providers, “none of that [information] is confidential.”

Truly appalling!
posted by Standeck at 11:24 AM on February 4, 2016 [40 favorites]

I don't have access to the Virginia Code of Laws right now, but I'd look down the imposter side of the fraud tree, if I wanted to bring the heat here. They are clearly posing os healthcare providers, in any case.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:28 AM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ugh.

When doing some basic research early on in my wife's pregnancy, I remember a Google ad popping up at the top of the search results. The ad said "Looking for Planned Parenthood?" with a URL that looked kinda like plannedparenthood.org, which routed visitors to a crisis pregnancy center's website. The site auto-played a baldly deceitful (and graphic) video that was called something like "The Truth of Abortion." These people are going to hell.
posted by duffell at 11:30 AM on February 4, 2016 [10 favorites]

In a country that handled abortions in a sane manner, they would be administered in a normal medical center and there would be no abortion-specific clinics.
posted by graymouser at 11:30 AM on February 4, 2016 [98 favorites]

The retired doctor said she doesn’t believe an outright fraud happened. She said it was an omission of information.

Sin of Omission is a big one.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:33 AM on February 4, 2016 [6 favorites]

“We had an 11-year-old girl come in with her parents. They thought she was pregnant,” Lohman said. “Turns out she wasn’t. But we gave them all the information.”

Did they consider reporting a sexually active 11-year-old to authorities?

“Oh no, we don’t do that. We’re not doctors, so we don’t have to,” Lohman said.

These people are trash.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:34 AM on February 4, 2016 [116 favorites]

I'm an atheist, but there is a special place in hell for this woman and these staff.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:36 AM on February 4, 2016 [7 favorites]

I went to college with the author of that article, and I am a little surprised she didn't tear down Triple A with her bare fucking hands.

Seriously. I read Petula Dvorak whenever she is in the paper, and this is actually one of her more restrained columns. I think she must have just figured that this situation is so egregious that it speaks for itself.
posted by OmieWise at 11:44 AM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

Seriously, why is it that when answering an AskMe we all have to stipulate IANYD and "this is not medical advice per se, but here's my opinion on that health thing" but these people can straight-up lie and offer medical advice that has life-or-death consequences?

In addition to the $5 entry fee, we are required to have souls.
posted by Etrigan at 11:56 AM on February 4, 2016 [79 favorites]

What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I feel sorry for that poor nice older widow, who just wanted to retire and hand the reins to someone else. She had no idea people would lie that hard to get what they want.
posted by corb at 12:00 PM on February 4, 2016

as a reminder, these types of crisis pregnancy centers are government funded.
posted by nadawi at 12:00 PM on February 4, 2016 [22 favorites]

I don't have access to the Virginia Code of Laws right now, but I'd look down the imposter side of the fraud tree, if I wanted to bring the heat here. They are clearly posing os healthcare providers, in any case.

Now that it's in WaPo, I feel like Mark Herring will be bringing the heat, if there's heat to be brought.
posted by indubitable at 12:01 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

There is a special place in hell for assholes like this.
Hope these horrible people like that irony.
posted by Theta States at 12:16 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

duffell: When doing some basic research early on in my wife's pregnancy, I remember a Google ad popping up at the top of the search results.

Same shit, different technology: the triple "a" in the name ensures that they would be first in the phone book listed alphabetically.
posted by dr_dank at 12:25 PM on February 4, 2016 [9 favorites]

It has always seemed to me that if you need to lie to get people to listen to your views on a topic, you might want to reconsider those views. There seem to be an awful lot of people out there who don't see it that way.
posted by TedW at 12:27 PM on February 4, 2016 [37 favorites]

It has always seemed to me that if you need to lie to get people to listen to your views on a topic, you might want to reconsider those views. There seem to be an awful lot of people out there who don't see it that way.

It's always been a major part of religious evangelicalism.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:29 PM on February 4, 2016 [12 favorites]

Back in 2014, Google removed all ads for fake abortion clinics, so if you see any fake abortion clinic ads, report it. (Anti-abortion advertising is still allowed, pretending to be an abortion clinic, is not.)
posted by fragmede at 1:10 PM on February 4, 2016 [44 favorites]

I am clueless about law, in general. But wouldn't Rico cover this?
posted by Splunge at 1:23 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think it would only be fair to offer this clinic some service that you are only pretending to be able and willing to preform, like cleaning, say. And once they've given you the keys and left you alone in the building, instead of cleaning you just shit all over everything and leave a monstrous mess for someone else to clean up.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 1:28 PM on February 4, 2016 [10 favorites]

There is no God and there is no hell, so these people will likely pass into peaceful oblivion convinced that they have help the hundreds or thousands of people they have irrevocably harmed and never answer for their crimes. If you want people like this punished, lobby hard to make bullshit like this an open and shut crime. Go, right now, contact your congressional representatives (and if you live in Virginia, your state representatives) and tell them what you think about this. Don't rely on existing laws that they likely have enough legal advice to skirt. Act.
posted by Caduceus at 1:28 PM on February 4, 2016 [32 favorites]

This woman and her staff are a bunch of fucking shitheels. Is there a collective noun for a bunch of fucking shitheels? If so, then I will amend my statement and call them that.
posted by ersatzkat at 1:29 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

This woman and her staff are a bunch of fucking shitheels. Is there a collective noun for a bunch of fucking shitheels? If so, then I will amend my statement and call them that.

A stankheap. A stankheap of shitheels.
posted by duffell at 1:38 PM on February 4, 2016 [26 favorites]

Is there a collective noun for a bunch of fucking shitheels?

yes - a congress of shitheels
posted by pyramid termite at 2:07 PM on February 4, 2016 [11 favorites]

Is there a collective noun for a bunch of fucking shitheels?

yes - a congress of shitheels

I would suggest "Grand Old Party", but there is a lot of overlap between that and "congress", so both work for me.
posted by TedW at 2:11 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

yes - a congress of shitheels

A congeries, surely.

Unfortunately for the "these people are bad and should feel bad" side, the constant reiteration that they are Saving Preshus Babeez is the excuse that they use for any and all crimes.
posted by emjaybee at 2:13 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is the face of evil.

And they have a Yelp listing. A reading of which really highlights some of the problems with Yelp.
posted by Mitheral at 2:15 PM on February 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

Also how is providing and interpreting a pregnancy test, even if of the over the counter pee on a stick variety, not providing medical services with all the attendant regulation that implies? Has this been specifically written out of the law?
posted by Mitheral at 2:19 PM on February 4, 2016 [7 favorites]

Have they no sense of decency? At long last, have they no sense of decency at all?
posted by klangklangston at 2:24 PM on February 4, 2016 [9 favorites]

That is evil. Preying on people through deception is a wicked thing to do. If they bought an orphanage and looked after those children silently, fine, but this feint is deplorable and immoral on every level imaginable.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 2:26 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

And they have a Yelp listing. A reading of which really highlights some of the problems with Yelp.

Yelp is a protection racket. There are nothing but problems with it.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:28 PM on February 4, 2016 [8 favorites]

Mitheral, from what I understand most states define medical services in a fairly limited way, it isn't so much that peeing on a stick is written out of the law as it is that the law specifies certain things as medical services and anything other than those things don't count.

Some actually do have doctors on staff to run ultrasound machines and so on, others have ultrasound but specify that it's non-medical and non-analytical so technically its legal.

In theory many could be sued. But due to the restrictive way the USA defines legal standing for lawsuits, it'd take one specific woman claiming a particular material harm to let a lawsuit go forward, and mostly women just want their abortion and to move on, not to be the newest nationwide punching bag for every abusive forced birth advocate.

Klang: No.
posted by sotonohito at 2:28 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

if you ignore an 11 year old child who is most likely being abused because you don't "have to" do anything, you don't get to pretend to want to protect the children.
posted by nadawi at 2:42 PM on February 4, 2016 [80 favorites]

We are talking about people who support/encourage clinic bombings, doctor assassinations, and all sorts of lower-level harassment up to and including schoolkids. Should we be surprised at anything they do?
posted by emjaybee at 2:44 PM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

Well, not the already-born children, anyway. Convenient, that.
posted by rtha at 2:45 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

There is no God and there is no hell, so these people will likely pass into peaceful oblivion convinced that they have help the hundreds or thousands of people they have irrevocably harmed and never answer for their crimes.

And if you happen to be religion-oriented, as I am, punishing these people and preventing these kinds of crimes falls into the category of protecting the weak and vulnerable*, as Christ and other spiritual figures commanded.

*no, fetuses do NOT fall into this category, though pregnant women do.
posted by tully_monster at 3:24 PM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

After 35 years of fighting these people, from standing between them and clients, and leading them on merry chases in a doctor's car so he could leave in a different car, to having my name published on one of their wanted posters, I've begun to believe there is nothing we can do to stop them. All we can do is find ways to route around them. It's time to restart Jane's Collective.

I used to think we could win this fight. We can't. We just have to find ways to ameliorate the damage. The government will not protect us from the fetus fetishists. Only we can do that.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:03 PM on February 4, 2016 [22 favorites]

This article made me so angry my eyes started to cross. These people are manifestations of the fucking devil himself.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:07 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

they will have to answer to their God for being such unrepentant liars.

Or not, so the worst of both worlds.
posted by sneebler at 7:31 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

fuck these fucking fuckers
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:39 PM on February 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

These people are worse than me.
posted by HITLERTRON 5000 at 8:18 PM on February 4, 2016 [23 favorites]

Huh. I thought I'd already hit Peak Outrage but apparently I can be more outraged at the noxious fuckers who do shitty things to women in the name of religion.
posted by Alterscape at 8:40 PM on February 4, 2016

What gets me is that there is such a huge need these fuckers could be filling instead of doing whatever the fuck this is.

There is a gap in the American safety net that might be hard to see, like a gap in a staircase you've never learned to notice, but it is horrifically massive and lethal to both women and infants. Most of the reasons why the US infant and maternal mortality rates are more than double what our wealth and healthcare spending should otherwise predict fall outside of Planned Parenthood's primarily medical mission and require much more social kinds of support to fix. We are almost totally missing the direct financial and logistical support for families both before and after birth that every other developed nation in the world sees as an absolute necessity and the American electorate tends to instead view through darkly eugenic lenses. The resources, dedication, and community these shitheels have available to them could be pretty much exactly what what we need to make wanted pregnancies safer and healthier for everyone involved and even, in the end, make an awful lot more pregnancies wanted as they claim to want.

Outside of the US in the civilized world you get mailed a monthly check for each kid you have with things like bonuses when its time to buy things like school supplies, you get at least nearly free health care that is totally free when kids are involved, you get services like someone who will come around your house and clean it for you for free once a month and serve as an early warning signal for additional services you might need, and you get whole departments dedicated to helping people navigate the massive array of services available. This isn't pie in the sky bullshit, this is whats normal. The American way of worrying about incentivizing pregnancy, like that would be some kind of bad thing, in deeply racialized and classist ways and telling pregnant women to pull up their bootstraps is an aberration and its horrifying. Planned Parenthood is great, but they can't give you a place to stay for the duration of your pregnancy to get away from a shithead father like some aspect of the social safety net just about everywhere could do, they can't support you financially because the disruptions of your pregnancy are preventing you from working, they can't sort out getting you a lawyer to legally emancipate you from your shithead parents, and the scale of how much time they can spend with you is appropriate to the efficiency required by their medical mission. There is a desperate need for things that would be like pregnancy crisis centers but real, something more than just dishonest adoption factories or thin opportunities for evangelizing, to cover the holes we designed into our safety net that pregnant women fall through the hardest, and evangelical money and community could have done that.

But it never will.

It will always be so much easier for Christians like myself to turn away from the plight of both women and the unborn together, passing by on the other side of the road in our own self-righteousness like the priest in the parable of the good Samaritan, by declaring the root problem to be the choices of women. Why own up to how our own greed and self-interest as Christians causes us particularly to value low taxes over universal child care, how our own callousness prevents universal paid maternity leave, how our own sinful lack of compassion had led to support for struggling families being rolled back rather than strengthened so that a few can swim in Scrooge McDuck vaults of money, how so many women can't properly care for the children they already have because we can't be bothered to help with universal programs, when it is so much easier to blame anyone but ourselves? Even if we're pointing fingers at the least powerful among us.

Empirical evidence demonstrates that the way to protect the unborn would have been to act like we mean it when we claim to be Christian and empower women with choices and the dignity of supportive community rather than attempt to control women as these shitheels do. The incidence of induced abortion goes down not when societies throw women or doctors in jail or when violent bullshit artists stalk physicians, but when children are made to affect careers and educations less, when women have better access to better sources of family planning, when families don't need to worry about whether they can feed or house another child, and when pregnancy becomes safer for both mother and child through more universal healthcare. If what they really wanted was to demonstrate to their God stewardship of what they feel to be unborn children, then they would advocate for what really protects it, but thats not even close to what they do.

Its just such a fucking waste.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:05 AM on February 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

Pregnancy Clinics Fight for Right to Deny Abortion Information
posted by homunculus at 4:12 PM on February 20, 2016

The War Against Planned Parenthood Is Advancing
posted by homunculus at 4:13 PM on February 20, 2016