The on-campus PP support groups go under the name “Planned Parenthood Generation Action.” You can find a list of them here.
As Alternatives to Planned Parenthood:
Campus Health Centers
Planned Parenthood (PP) makes a point of putting centers near students. That’s low-hanging fruit for them; students are a major portion of their customers, and campus health centers are sometimes a major source of referrals.
But student pro-life groups are also on campus. This is handy for our grassroots defunding campaign, whose goal is finding alternatives for all the non-abortion medical services PP provides, in order to keep people from going to PP for any reason at all.
1.5-minute video with one case
Unlike other PP alternatives, we weren’t able to find an online list of campus health centers. But any student pro-life group members who want to be active on this probably already know, or could quickly find, the health center on their own college campus (or high schools).
If you don’t already know if there’s a PP center nearby, check our listings for your state. Even if you do know of the PP center, take a look because the listings will also tell you which Community Health Centers (CHCs) are already known to be nearby.
Remember, any woman who’s accustomed to going to PP for other reasons is likely to go there when an unexpected pregnancy comes, and PP staff are inclined to assume abortion’s what she needs. If instead she’s used to going to a facility where the staff members assume a prenatal clinic is called for when a pregnancy arises, then that could save a life.
That’s the quick pay-off. The long-term pay-off is that if people aren’t patronizing PP, then over time PP loses its political strength. Each PP center that closes has an impact on the larger organization’s national lobbying ability.
1. Does your campus health center refer people to Planned Parenthood?
If they refer people for Sexually-Transmitted Disease (STD) testing or treatment, or gynecological exams, or family planning, then alternatives can normally be found (or perhaps created).
If they refer women to PP for mammograms (some students are old enough, and faculty may use the campus centers), then they should know that PP only refers women elsewhere and doesn’t do mammograms directly. See our page on dealing with mammogram referrals.
Another project that might be simple and quick: does your campus center have brochures on display that include the PP center but not all of the alternative CHCs? If talking them out of displaying PP brochures isn’t workable, it might still help to be sure they also display brochures from reputable alternative places (see point #2 below). Providing more options for care is likely to be entirely unobjectionable, and every diversion of someone away from PP helps.
2. Are there good Community Health Centers (or Rural Health Clinics) that the campus center could refer people to instead?
Sometimes, the only reason the centers send people to PP is that PP has greater name recognition, or did a better job of making itself known to them.
If you think an alternative health center nearby might be suitable, you can research it with our google-doc checklist. Check our suggestions on researching CHCs.
It’s extremely important to research the centers before you send people there or suggest that the campus center send people there. Some CHCs aren’t as good as others, and may have problems such as months-long waiting lists. We don’t want to send people to a place where they have a bad experience if we could have foreseen that.
Another problem we need to watch out for: does the CHC support PP, or refer people to PP? There used to be a place in San Francisco where the PP center was inside the CHC! If the CHC is rabidly pro-PP, it’s probably not ideal as an alternative.
Second, you want to find out what advantages other places have over PP. Something as simple as price might be a clear difference, or cleanliness of the waiting rooms, or number of malpractice suits against the doctors. Any honest detail that we can give can help (and of course all honesty is crucial – the first line of attack PP usually uses is to attack accuracy, and the only defense is to be strictly accurate).
Please send all information you find to grassrootsdefunding@consistent-life.org, so we can get it on the web page and share it with others.
3. Could the campus center provide any of these services instead?
We’ve heard of centers that only offer STD tests if there are symptoms, but don’t offer the tests for regular screening. Some campus centers may not be able to afford to offer more, so grants or fund-raising could be in order. Others can afford it but have other reasons for not doing it. A campus-wide campaign to get them to cover more of the services themselves, rather than making referrals, might gather more support from groups on campus other than just the pro-life students and faculty, since it would meet students’ real needs much more conveniently. It would also provide better privacy, since reasons for going to a student health center are more numerous and being seen going into a PP center might be something some people are more shy about.
STD testing and treatment is around 38-40% of PP’s business, according to what PP says, so this effort alone could really make a major dent in providing alternatives to PP.
Of course, the recent legislation requiring California campus health centers to become chemical abortion facilities makes them problematic as a place to send people; the CHC or other alternative clinic is likely to be a better option when the task is to get people good medical care and get them out of an abortion-promoting orbit. But for women who aren’t pregnant, it’s still better that they go to the student health center than to PP whenever those are the only options available. PP is a political powerhouse that needs to be made less powerful through noncooperation.
Sharing the Information
When we have information about campus health centers as possible PP alternatives, we list them in the state listings under this heading:
We’re relying on local students to get us the information – the grassroots is where the biggest strength of the pro-life movement is! If anyone wants to be listed as a campaign organizer with your contact info on our web site, let us know.
Please send to:
grassrootsdefunding.org@consistent-life.org
To have a conversation with the project coordinator, call:
Rachel MacNair, 816-753-2057 (US Central Time Zone).
Download Flyers
You can download these and print them up anytime you have a good occasion to encourage others to join the student campaign. For flyers for the entire general campaign, see our “How to Participate” page.
Flyer for Students quarter page
PP Center on Campus:
There had previously been one at Stockton University in Pomona, New Jersey. It first closed temporarily because the university was closed due to Covid, but has now disappeared from PP’s list entirely.
CHC on Campus:
San Diego, California
FAMILY HEALTH AT CITY COLLEGE (3.78 miles away from the PP center). 1550 Broadway Suite 2 San Diego, CA 92101-5713. Tel: 619-515-2300.
Their web page says they serve students, staff, and nearby residents.
Projects for Students – Done in One Semester
These are individual projects we’ve thought of for one student or group of students to have a sense of achievement in the time frame of one semester:
Do the research on the suitability of the nearby CHCs; you might hold research parties. An entire campaign can’t be done in a semester, but you may be able to talk the more long-term local pro-life groups into following up if the initial legwork has been done.
Pregnancy resource centers that are already very close to PP centers can potentially pull away more of those entering PP by offering STD tests. They need to have the idea, have arrangements made, and figure out how to pay for the testing to make it low-cost or free. The research needed to set that up is something college students might excel in.
Doing a survey among patients of the CHC to ascertain how good it is, or how patients think it might be improved, might work as a class project in appropriate courses.
For large cities where there are a number of CHCs and similar alternatives, putting together a consumer guide can be a good one-semester project for a group. When the alternative medical places can honestly be shown to be better than PP on objective criteria, then a consumer guide can be an excellent way of spreading that information.
If local alternatives have been researched and found suitable, find out who’s referring to PP and see if you can talk them into referring to those other options instead – or at least in addition.
Find other local options for STD testing and treatment, and why they’re better (such as price, not having health code violations, whatever is honest and works). Find out who’s referring to PP for STD testing and treatment, and acquaint them with the other options and explain why they’re better.
Find out who’s referring to PP for mammograms and, since PP doesn’t do mammograms and refers women elsewhere, talk those referring to PP into sending people directly to the places that actually do the mammograms.
Find out where the local emergency rooms refer patients to. Sometimes they only refer to the hospital’s own over-crowded facilities. If their referrals don’t include alternatives to PP, patients could end up at PP because an opportunity to get them familiar with the CHC (or other suitable alternative) has been lost.
A good class project or group project might be a campus-wide survey of students about their attitudes on PP and on local alternatives. It could uncover reasons for using one rather than the other. It might work as a good way of educating about the alternatives when the problem is that students simply aren’t aware of them. In addition to your own campus, think of other campuses in the vicinity.
If you find that there are other good projects that students can do for the community in one semester, please send them to grassrootsdefunding@consistent-life.org, or write a blog post about them.
Local activists share what they found out about what does and doesn’t work well, and offer action ideas. See our list of blog posts. We encourage anyone with something to share to write a post for the blog; send submission to grassrootsdefunding@consistent-life.org.