Dr. Jennifer Morse discusses the legal and practical challenges facing pregnancy care centers, especially regarding LGBT issues, emphasizing the need for robust legal protection and understanding.
Summary
This is Jacob Barr, and I recently had a thought-provoking conversation on the pro-life Team Podcast with Dr. Jennifer Morse from the Ruth Institute. Dr. Morse shared her insights on how pregnancy care centers can prepare for legal challenges, especially regarding LGBT issues that are increasingly relevant today. She emphasized the importance of having solid legal protections in place for clinics, and offered resources through the Ruth Institute, such as a pamphlet for sidewalk counselors to address transgender medicine issues. Dr. Morse also highlighted the role of the pregnancy care center movement as a true women’s movement, focusing on the support and needs of women often overlooked by the mainstream narrative. It was an enlightening discussion about navigating the complex and evolving challenges facing pregnancy care centers.
#Hashtags: #PregnancyCareChallenges, #LGBTIssues, #LegalPreparedness, #ProLifeInsights, #RuthInstitute, #WomensMovement, #SidewalkCounseling, #TransgenderMedicine, #HealthcareEthics, #CommunitySupport
Transcript
The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Hi, everyone i’m Doctor Jennifer Morse i’m founder and President of the Ruth Institute, and I’m pleased to be here today with the pro-life team to talk with you about things that will help pregnancy care centers be ready for any kind of legal challenges that might come down your way down the Pike. And also to deal with the many LGBT issues that are landing on the doorsteps of this great movement of pregnancy care centers in the United States.
Jacob Barr :
So Doctor Jennifer Morse, I’m excited to have you on the pro-life Team Podcast today. Would you introduce yourself as if you were speaking to a group of Precy Clinic Executive Directors and leadership teams?
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
My name is Doctor Jennifer Robach Morris i’m founder and president of The Ruth Institute. We are an interfaith international coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love. And I recently had the privilege of addressing a group of pregnancy care centers and their executives and their volunteers in Cincinnati and Dayton. I provided their annual training for them and they wanted me to talk with them about LGBT related issues, their usual people who came to offer them training in the, you know, the many aspects that people have to deal with in the in the pregnancy care center world. The questions that the that the ladies had this year having to do with LGBT issues, their usual people didn’t feel qualified to answer. So I’m like the only person on planet Earth who can answer these questions so I think we should, you know, get zoomed in and focused on those things that i think may be on a lot of people’s minds.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, i agree completely. About three months ago, I went to every abortion clinic website I could as part of a research project. And I discovered, unintentionally, that a majority were offering hormone blocks and hormone ads. And that was and that sort of, you know, made me realize, oh wow, we really need to figure out how to respond to our opposition promoting tea as an LGBT. So would you yeah would you just go ahead and start from wherever you think is appropriate, maybe in the beginning of this? Yeah and just go ahead and tell us what you what you know, what you understand and how this will help frankly, clinic leadership teams get a grasp, a grasp of this new scenario.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Well, so the first thing I can tell you about that is that a couple of years ago we became aware of what you just said that hormone prescribing hormones cross sex hormones but more than puberty blockers I suppose but prescribing hormones has become a big cash cow for Planned Parenthood. And just as you mentioned the sidewalk counselors, that’s who we first heard it from we had a conference and we had people from different aspects of the sexual revolution you know, people deal with different. This is all one giant thing and nobody can be informed about everything so getting all the people in the room together is very helpful. But we had some sidewalk counselors who were saying to us, you know, look, we don’t know what to say because we’ve noticed that every Friday at this particular clinic, the people coming in are all people coming for trans related medicine, prescriptions, hormones, that’s what they’re coming for they’re not coming for pregnancy tests or whatnot and we don’t know what to say, we don’t know what to do for them. So we, in collaboration with our friends at the American College of Pediatricians, we put together a pamphlet that sidewalk counselors can use. And you can get that on the Ruth Institute website. And we have a website kind of behind that pamphlet, and it’s called transregret.com Trans Regret. And basically the point of that pamphlet is to get people to slow down before they do something irrevocable to their bodies. And it’s written for, you know, a teen or a teenager it doesn’t have a lot of scientific jargon and stuff like that, although we do have references for that. But it’s meant to just slower just to ask questions in the person’s mind you know, will I be OK will I be happy are there other solutions? You know, should I get a second opinion you know, that kind of thing. So that’s one thing that the Ruth Institute has to offer that the pregnancy care clinics, I don’t, I don’t know if all of them are involved with sidewalk counselors, but probably a lot of them are. But this is for the use of the sidewalk counselors to hand people as they walk in. The other thing that I did when I spoke with the with the clinic workers in Cincinnati and Dayton is I put together a four part presentation which you can get at the Ruth Institute and it’s on our podcast page you go to ruthinstitute.org you look for podcast and you’ll find the audio it’s audio only they didn’t do you know, a visual like what we’re doing here. But I included the slides so you can follow along with the slides and the slides have all the references that I all the studies and all of that stuff that I talk about is all referenced there in the slides and you can easily download them for yourself. So it might be helpful Jacob, for us to kind of just go through what were those four talks about and you know why people might need this information and that kind of thing what do you what do you think about that?
Jacob Barr :
That, yeah, that sounds good. And I would say there’s probably 2 like well, there’s two likely scenarios definitely the sidewalk counselor who will experience people going for transgender services and that’s important to offer a healthy alternative. But then there’s also I recently interviewed a pregnancy clinic. I guess I forget if she was the executive director or the OR the nurse or the medical team leader. But essentially they had a couple come in for a pregnancy test. However, one looked like a man and one looked like a woman. But it turned out the one who looked like a man was the one actually interested in the pregnancy test. And that was something that’s a new scenario for pregnancy clinics to have to deal with, is someone with chest hair and who’s presenting as a man but yet has the biological makeup of a woman needing help and services that’s the other scenario that I know of besides those who are going to an abortion clinic or a Planned Parenthood for tea services.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
That’s right and so from the perspective of the executive directors and board members, I hope there are board members watching as well, because the board members, strictly speaking, are the governing bodies. If these are a nonprofit organization, the board is really in charge, right. And so I hope there are board members paying attention to this as well. The first talk that I gave was to just give a big picture overview of the sexual revolution, how all the moving parts kind of fit together so that people could have a perspective. That’s based on my book, which I have on my shelf here called The Sexual State. And so it’s just an introduction to that. But then the second talk that I gave was really about legal protections for your clinic so when you’re dealing with this kind of surprising scenario, you know, and you’re going what, you know, that kind of thing, people have two concerns. The 1st is they’re concerned how am I going to help this person i don’t really understand what’s going on what do I need to know in order to be able to help this person and serve them in a Christ like manner? Ok but the second question people are concerned about is how do I keep from getting sued, you know, what’s going on in the legal environment, What am I allowed to say, what am I allowed to do, you know, so on and so forth. So the talks that I gave, there was one whole talk just on how to protect your, how to protect your center. And I I’m not an attorney, so I’m going to give you that proviso right off the chute. But I consulted with several people, including people from the Alliance Defending Freedom. Now, I don’t know if you all are familiar with the Alliance Defending Freedom, I’m sure that many of you are, but they’re a public interest law firm that helps Christians defend themselves, defend the religious liberty and defend the right to life. They have come up with a whole list of documents governing documents that your organization needs to have in order to have the maximum religious liberty protection. And in the talk that I just mentioned, you know, this is talk number two, legal protections for your PCC. There’s a whole list of those documents and there’s a link where you can link to ADF and you can find their whole explanation, everything like that. But it’s very important that you get an attorney to help you with this i would not recommend that you cut and paste what they have there they will don’t want you to cut and paste, but you need to be aware and there are two basic scenarios here. One is religious liberty generally has been litigated a lot and so they have a pretty good idea what you need for maximum protection for your center. You need a statement of faith. You need policies that have to do with your scope of care, policies that have to do with your employee code of conduct, that kind of thing. You know, So you want to have all those documents ready and that you’re committed to these policies before you have an incident because you don’t want to make it up on the fly that is a much weaker position for you to be in so I honestly, I just cannot emphasize this enough. You must do everything you can now before you have an incident to get your religious liberty protections as solid as they can be. Ok, And I think so that’s 1 the second point is what are the legal issues surrounding how you treat a person who presents as the opposite sex that from what they’re born? Are there things you’re allowed to say, things you’re not allowed to say? And the answer to that question, no one knows. Literally no one knows it was not one attorney who would commit themselves to saying this is what you’re allowed to do and not do because there are federal rules, state rules, in some cases, city and locality rules, OK. So they can’t make a general statement about that kind of stuff. So at the very least, you’ve got to have the basic religious liberty documents in place. And then for the rest, you know, we’re all kind of trying to figure it out. And I will tell you this it I, in my opinion, there is most likely somebody at this very moment planning a lawsuit against a pregnancy care center. They are already thinking about what’s the right jurisdiction in which to take this lawsuit. Well, what can, how do we set it up? Who do we send in there to target them and what outcome do we want That will be generally applicable, not just the city of Cincinnati or something, but the whole country you know, they are already thinking about that. I you know, I don’t know that for a fact, but I think you need to assume that that’s the case oK. So please don’t wait another minute you know, find go within your community those of you who are executive directors and board members, you have a lot of supporters in your community. Some of them are attorneys. I’m sure you’ve got attorneys who give you money. You go talk to them. You know, pick up the phone, schmooze with them and say wouldn’t you like to be an ADF and Alliance Defending Freedom Allied attorney they will help train you and you help us get this done you know you don’t want to just drag a lawyer off the street who does wills and trusts and say help us do this. They won’t do it. You know, they’ll know. They’ll know i you need more expertise than I have but i just want to plead with all of your people. Please get this done don’t wait.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, i think there’s a majority of Princey Clinics that are probably connected with NIFLA, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. And I know that NIFLA is very closely connected with ADF. In fact, when NIFLA went to the Supreme Court with NIFLA versus Bacara over freedom of speech, ADF was their attorney. And so they and they work very closely with ADF regularly along with other legal groups. And so when it comes to the benefits of being, when it comes to being formed as a religious organization, can you talk about the benefits maybe in hiring practices and then what other benefits you might have recognized or seen?
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Well, I can’t, honestly, I I’m not in a position to talk about that in a general way because everybody’s situation is a little different. But if you are religious nonprofit organizations, there’s a set of documents that you use to more or less demonstrate that you know and the things that you just mentioned are part of that package you know that you expect certain conduct from your people. You know that if somebody, you’ve hired somebody and they have signed this simple, this statement saying, I understand this is the code of conduct. And then they turn around and decide they’re going to be in a same sex union or, you know, something like that, then you have grounds for dismissal because you’ve already told them. But if they out of the blue and you haven’t ever brought it up, it happens. Now you got a problem, you know, I mean if that’s an issue for your for your center, so it’s there’s some general principles but it’s but also it has to be adapted to your situation. Now the other whole aspect of the, you know, the trick that has to do with the trans issue is you know who are these people who are coming to you and what are they thinking and you know what is what is going on with them. And again, there’s a lot of complexity there and I had a whole talk on understanding the transminded client and that the term trans gets used in a lot of different ways. And the reason for that Jacob, is that transgender, the term transgender does not have a medically diagnosable objective meaning you know, it’s not like it can take a blood test or check somebody’s chromosomes or get a hormone levels or something like that it’s not, there’s nothing quite like that. It’s self identification. I’m trans because I say I’m trans and people can say that for all kinds of reasons, right and some of those reasons are going to, you know, are going to be, well, they’re just all over the place they can be all over the place. So you’re not really sure what you’re dealing with somebody walks in the clinic with for you. So the talk that I gave on this just kind of spells out some of the different reasons that people choose that T identity and what you might be dealing with when they come through the door. You know, now the thing that you mentioned the place where they, the people didn’t look the way you expect a man to look. They didn’t look the way you expect a woman to look. This issue came up within our conversations you know, in the two days that I spent with the with the pregnancy care workers and one of the things we came up with, I’m going to just throw this out there. You might want to do some kind of desensitization training for your people, for your volunteers and your, you know, whoever’s interacting with the public so that you don’t go, you know, so that you are a little bit less apartment to have that type of reaction, you know, I don’t know. For all I know, it’s illegal for you to have a facial expression like that you know what i mean that could be where we’re headed but the point is, if you’re trying to serve people, freaking out in front of them is not helpful right. So it might be helpful for some of your workers to and I don’t know who does that training. You know, this is this is a whole new thing, but I think it’s something worth thinking about.
Jacob Barr :
Well, and I think part of part of the purpose of this podcast is to share new ideas. And i believe that while there are people working in this new space I feel like we’re in the development stage of programs that need to be built and so literally just sharing the idea that oh there it would be helpful to have training like this means that maybe someone will take that up because I don’t know of a training like that and there could be one that exists but they’re also there’s obviously an opportunity for someone to make it and help many groups with better responses and healthier and loving more loving responses and being prepared for these new scenarios.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
That’s right. And, you know, they engaged me because I have a body of expertise. But I went in there and I learned so much from them, you know, because all of you who are doing this type of work, you are doing hand to hand combat for souls, you know, I mean, you are, you are right there where the rubber meets the road with the sexual revolution i’m like flying above here at 30.000 thousand feet, dropping bombs or something like that you guys are like, right in the middle of it. And so I learned, oh, Jacob, I learned so much from listening to these ladies but so I want to tell you one thing i found out it is possible for a man to have a positive pregnancy test that doesn’t prove he’s pregnant. And i was like what? What you guys what? Oh my gosh these nice ladies have drunk the kool-aid what is going on here? No, what they say, no. All a pregnancy test is it’s a test for some levels of a particular hormone. Ok. And if that hormone is elevated, it means that the woman is pregnant oK. And so there’s a normal range for an A non pregnant woman and a normal range for pregnant woman and there’s kind of a Gray area in between, you know, but the point is a man has those that has that hormone too. And the normal level for a man is way below what is normal for a pregnant woman. So if a man comes back with a positive pregnancy test that is an abnormal finding, right his no man should have that hormone that high. And they said to me, and I looked it up and verified this, it’s, it could be an indicator of testicular cancer. And so think, you know, just think about it so the man is pretending to be a woman who wants a pregnancy tester it’s deluded. Think, well, you know, whether he’s pretending or deluded doesn’t matter but he comes and he wants a pregnancy test. If it turns out that he has a positive pregnancy test, he could be really sick with something that these ladies are in no position to help him with whatsoever, right i mean, that’s way beyond anything that they can help them with. So here’s what they came up with i’m going to recite this to you this was one of the groups over there and there, you know, we’re all kind of feeling our way along here, but here’s what it says. According to our policy, we are only able to offer services to clients that are biologically female. It is out of our scope of practice to perform pregnancy tests or ultrasounds for example, on those who are biologically male. In the event that a client is a biological male and has a positive pregnancy test, this would be an abnormal finding and could indicate a medical issue that we are not equipped to address. The normal finding would be a negative pregnancy test. So in other words, they talk about in another of the groups said something like this is outside our scope of care, right, Because there’s and that’s an important term I guess in medical places, right. I don’t i don’t know anything about medicine, but that’s outside our scope of care and so you know you really need. You’re going to need to address this with someone else we can’t help you with this.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah, one of the, So that’s.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
What they’re trying.
Jacob Barr :
And one of the phrases that I I’ve heard there’s a medical legal expert, tom tom Glessner he often says that we, you know, when it comes to ultrasounds, it’s important to say we provide limited ultrasound services limited as in we only look for certain things in certain scenarios. And I think the same thing. I never even thought everything crossed my mind that there could be a limited pregnancy test service, but essentially limited to females. We were biological females because I didn’t even realize that there was another scenario available so.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
No i didn’t i of course i did neither the typical person would not but the point is that a lot of these women are because they are in the day-to-day trenches of dealing with this, of many of these scenarios have already come up and they’re already thinking ahead for it and stuff like that. A couple of them told me that they already they have same sex couples they have lesbian couples who come to them and they serve them and they serve them with their what do you call it? You know their classes and you know just a lot of different things they certainly serve the people regardless of their sexual orientation. But there’s no medical services. You know, there’s not the issue of providing obstruct obstetric services or something to a man you know what I mean that this. So they’ve already some of them have already dealt with the scenario where two women come in and they need some kind of help or they ask for some kind of help and they just say, OK, we’re going to give it to you know, we’re going to help you here’s where, here’s how you earn your baby clothes they have baby bucks and stuff like that and they have different rules about how you earn your baby bucks and so you can get your car seat, you know, who can take the parenting classes and, you know, just a lot of different scenarios like that go into it. But you need to think it through before they walk through the door that’s the main thing you know you don’t want to be making it up on the fly, definitely.
Jacob Barr :
Yeah well, it sounds to me like this is a new chapter for operational handbooks on you know when it when a client has these demographics. Here are some guidelines for what we should do that might be unique.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Right.
Jacob Barr :
So you said you discovered this two or three years ago. How did you come about discovering this or what was the flag or the signal that you saw?
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
That well, we were, we were just listening to people you know, we had a conference like I said, we had a conference, I forget which year it was, but we had a conference and we had in the room. There were people who were involved in sidewalk counseling and there were people who were involved in dealing with the trans issue in a variety of ways. And there was also a lady in the room who teaches natural family planning, you know, which is contraceptive free, methods of spacing, births and stuff like that. So anyway, there’s this guy given a talk on the guy who’s done a lot of journalism on the trans issue. And so there was a whole very active discussion around that, you know, because he’s the guy he writes for the Christian Post his name’s Brandon Showalter. He writes for the Christian Post and heartbroken parents write to write to him, call him and say, well, how do I help my child what do I do how do I, you know, the school is breathing down our necks and, you know, so on and so forth anyway, so Brandon gave his talk and that sparked this conversation in the room, you know, with all these different people together and somebody, you know, made the point, as I just said to you, yeah, I wouldn’t have known it if that particular guy hadn’t been there right but he said, you know, we’re noticing this and we don’t know what to do. And so that’s what put us to work on that question. But one of the interesting things was in the in the course of that conversation, Brandon said that trans medicine is the only area of endocrinology where the point of the medicine is to disrupt a perfectly functional hormonal system for the sake of a social goal you know, these people have perfectly functioning endocrine systems there’s nothing wrong with their hormones. They have a social reason for wanting to change your hormones. And my friend who does natural family planning, the two of us looked at each other across the room went, oh, that’s not quite true, Brandon you know, because the birth control pill and the Nuvar ring and you know, all of those type of hormonal devices are means of disrupting perfectly functioning hormonal systems in order to achieve a social goal. You know, and so it’s like in some way we’ve already been desensitized on that on that kind of issue you know, like it’s OK for us to disrupt our healthy bodies because of something we want, you know, So anyway that that’s how it worked for us that’s how we that that’s a very Ruth Institute experience, by the way. You know, you have people talking about a variety of things and all of a sudden you’re making connections, you know? Yeah, how these things fit together.
Jacob Barr :
Well, and I think i remember like i sort of knew that Planned Parenthood was working in this hormone space, but it never really dawned on me to respond to it. And then when I went to all these abortion clinic websites, I found Planned Parenthood’s website was only one out of 188 that I had visited. And so there were several like small county, well, single county I guess I should say abortion clinics, you know, servicing a certain area that were offering the hormone services or the tea services and so that’s when I realized I did not expect to see these, you know, relatively small. Essentially many of these abortion clinics were offering three services abortion was my indicator whether or not they were an abortion clinic. And then many of them about 70 % were offering T services or hormones, hormone changes, ads and remove ads and blocks. And then the third service was usually something relatively normal looking or help, you know, a regular medical service. And a lot of them offered three services and yeah, the T was the second out of the three. And it just made me realize that it almost sort of felt like with the Dobbs case that they were prepared for Dobbs and then they fast tracked the T in response to abortion becoming harder to provide. It’s sort of what my gut reaction was.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Well, and what you’re reacting to is the profit motive behind both the abortion services and the transgender services you know, you’re seeing this is a market. They’re satisfying the market, but they’re also pumping the market with propaganda all of the pro abortion, pro trans rhetoric is all a sales pitch, an indirect sales pitch for their services and so every time anybody in the media or entertainment or anything like that valorizes this stuff, it is in effect a commercial for those type of services and it and it really is putting the profit motive ahead of the people. So that’s part of the world in which we live, isn’t it, Jacob?
Jacob Barr :
It is. So as we wrap up this podcast, what are your final thoughts in this space? Yeah, what are your, what would you like to say before we wrap things up?
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Let me put my ears back in here. Yeah, i do think it would. I do think it would. I think it would be helpful for a lot of your people to be familiar with my book, The Sexual State, because I really go into it in detail kind of how the government has promoted all of the sexual revolution, how the parts of the sexual revolution fit together and how it’s never been a really a mass movement it looks like a mass movement now, but that was all came from the top down, right. And the fact is, and I made this point when I was talking to the ladies in Cincinnati, the pregnancy care center movement is a women’s movement. It is absolutely a women’s movement you know that i’m sure, you know, you go to these meetings and it’s 90 % women, at least 90 %. Sometimes their husbands are along to carry their luggage or something, you know, but and they do have guys who come and counsel the fathers, you know, So, you know, there’s always a handful of guys but basically it’s a women’s movement from the woman’s heart, serving other women. But we never get treated as the women’s movement you know, that’s very interesting that somebody else always gets to be the women’s movement. And we’re not the women’s movement, even though we are, you know, even though, yeah, you know, we don’t count as women’s movement and so I would like to offer that encouragement to people, you know, to understand that you have every right to think of yourself as the, as an authentic women’s movement working for the benefit of women, working for the benefit of women who are being ignored by the current system. You know women who want their babies, women who wish they had husbands oftentimes women who wish they had more reliable partners. Women who are watching their kids go through it. Things that they know are going to not work very well you know and wishing that they had a better social and cultural environment for their kids and grandkids to grow up in. You know we are the women’s movement and we never get the credit for that so I would like to offer people that kind of encouragement and offer people to come over to the Ruth Institute, look at look around at what we’ve got we got a lot of stuff that I think that will be helpful to you including these particular podcasts that I mentioned to you at the beginning. But also you know if you’re so inclined, whoops, if you’re so inclined the book The Sexual State I think will be helpful to you. One of the big parts of this, I break it down that there are three parts to the sexual revolution. And the 1st and biggest part is the contraceptive ideology, which says that the a good society should separate sex and babies. Everybody should get to have all the sex they want without ever having a baby. And the biggest part of this book talks about that ideology and the propaganda behind it. And y’all in the pregnancy care center movement, the way they’re talking about you, the way they’re treating you, that’s all part of the propaganda move, the psychological warfare, you could say, to prop up this, you know, really irrational ideology that we’re going to build a whole society where sex and babies are completely disconnected.
Jacob Barr :
That makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
How does that even work? How does that even work? You know, like that could be but that’s what they want, you know, so.
Jacob Barr :
Wow well, thank you so much for yeah, just being on here and sharing such good wisdom, would you, would you close out our podcast with a prayer with the expectation that those who are listening will join in and join in on the prayer that you share?
Dr. Jennifer Morse :
Ok. Well, you know, Roman Catholics, we have a tendency to have prepared prayers that everybody knows so if I do that, that’s fine that everybody knows it but I but I, you know like to share the share the sentiment, you know, the plea that almighty God be merciful to us. Yeah let me just let me, let me just start, OK in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord God, we ask you to have mercy on our country. We’ve lost our way in so many ways. And we know that we need you and we know that we don’t deserve your mercy. But we at what we plead for ourselves and for our countrymen, country, women, our neighbors, there’s so many have lost their way. And so we ask that you would be merciful to us, that you would enlighten us, and that you would unharden our hearts, because so many of us have hardened hearts. And now I would ask all who can do so in good conscience to join me in the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil amen in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy spirit amen.