With Roe gone, Planned Parenthood charts a new path
Susan Dunlap saw the writing on the wall.
As president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, she has spent the past several years preparing for the possibility of this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ended the nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion. With eight states already banning abortion, she’s seeing a “dramatic and substantial increase” in the number of out-of-state patients inquiring about or traveling to Los Angeles for abortion care. It’s what she anticipated, considering that California is among the most abortion-friendly states in the nation, and so far, she says, her team has been able to handle the surge.
“But what has surprised me,” says Ms. Dunlap, “is how angry I feel and how sad” at the “cruel” disruption of families, futures, and health care. “We do a good job of planning, but planning hasn’t protected any of us, best I can see, from the hurt, and the anger, and the pain, and the shock.”
She hears all of that in the voices of parents who call her because their daughters are suddenly asking them whether it’s safe to attend college in a state with a ban. She sees increased fear in patients from outside California who don’t want to reveal where they are from; or who book appointments for one kind of service, and then reveal once they arrive that they came in to end a pregnancy.
To meet this moment – and the years ahead – Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers will need compassion, says Ms. Dunlap, who has worked for the nation’s leading provider of reproductive
