All Sides React Heatedly in O.C. to Clinic Ruling

Orange County’s anti-abortion community was elated, while abortion-rights activists were outraged Thursday by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that barred federally funded family planning clinics from discussing abortion with their patients.

“I think we’re moving into a new era. . . . The court is saving the babies,” exulted the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, a national anti-abortion group based in Anaheim that counts 400 county church congregations among its members.

Sheldon, who said he plans to visit Washington on June 10 to fight a House bill aimed at reversing the high court ruling legalizing abortion, added, “Our tax dollars have got to stop killing the babies.”

Also applauding was Bishop Norman F. McFarland of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.

“If federal funds or tax dollars cannot be used (to discuss abortion), I would say, amen!” said McFarland, who cautioned that he had not yet read details of the ruling.

Caught in the middle--and not quite sure what to think--were patients of family planning clinics, some of whom heard of the ruling from pregnancy counselors.

At Planned Parenthood’s Santa Ana clinic, a 20-year-old college student and her boyfriend learned of the ruling shortly after they got what for them was welcome news that she is not pregnant.

“We’re not ready for a baby, and I’m totally against abortion,” she said, but she did not like the implications of the Supreme Court ruling.

“What if I was raped?” she asked, brown eyes flashing in anger. “I wouldn’t be too happy if I couldn’t consider an abortion--if they just couldn’t tell me just because some regulation said they couldn’t.”

Meanwhile, two of the five county agencies that receive federal family planning money vowed to continue abortion counseling--and refuse U.S. funding--if Congress does not circumvent the court’s 5-4 ruling.

“We will risk losing federal support,” pledged Margie Fites Siegle, executive director of Planned Parenthood/Orange and San Bernardino counties. “We will continue to offer options counseling.”

The agency receives $112,000 a year in federal family planning money and typically counsels about 21,000 pregnant women annually. In those sessions--at five clinics in Orange County and a sixth in Upland--agency workers tell women that they have the choice of keeping their baby, offering it for adoption or legally terminating the pregnancy. If the woman chooses abortion, she is referred to a local doctor or the agency’s Upland clinic.

But Siegle termed the ruling “a gag rule” that is “morally outrageous,” that violates the doctor-patient relationship and that bars workers from discussing legal abortion.

Also, she said, the ruling might force low-income clients at family planning clinics to have unwanted babies, while wealthier women can still learn of abortions from private doctors.

In Anaheim, at the Orange County Center for Health, executive director Marcia Vickery also said her 21-year-old clinic would continue abortion counseling--and risk losing $12,000 a year in federal funds.

At that clinic, federal Title X money now pays for valuable services--birth control, pregnancy testing, cancer treatment and treatment of sexual diseases for low-income women.

But, Vickery said, “if this isn’t resolved” by legislation circumventing the ruling, “we’d probably just decline the money.”

It is a small part of the agency’s budget of $2 million a year, she said.

Officials from two other local clinics--the Laguna Beach Community Clinic, with $14,000 a year in federal family planning money, and the Huntington Beach Community Clinic, $72,000--said they had not decided what to do.

Abortion has long been mentioned as an option during pregnancy counseling, officials at those offices said, but their boards must decide soon whether they will continue to accept federal money.

Jackie Curran, executive director of the Huntington Beach clinic, said, “We will continue to provide counseling options until we hear from Title X regulators.”

That could takes weeks or months, she said, because federal regulations barring abortion counseling now conflict with state Office of Family Planning rules that ask a clinic to mention the alternatives to abortion.

Orange County Health Care Agency official Len Foster said the ruling will have “no fundamental effect” on that agency’s $416,784 allotment of U.S. family planning money in fiscal 1991-92.

Under longstanding county policy, the agency offers pregnancy testing, prenatal care and the option of adoption to pregnant women, but it does not suggest abortion, Foster said.

That policy has regularly been accepted by state auditors, said Foster, who noted that “the issue of abortion is very much a non-issue to our patient population,” because 99% of the clients are Latinas who do not want abortions.

The county policy barring abortion counseling began in the mid-1970s, one county official said, when there was a Roman Catholic Board of Supervisors majority.

Planned Parenthood’s Siegle promised a “massive lobbying effort” by foundation activists and other local women’s groups to overturn the high court ruling.

Siegle said her group will ask California Sen. John Seymour and Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach)--the only county federal legislators who Planned Parenthood says support family planning--to support a bill by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) that seeks to reverse the Supreme Court ruling before it takes effect in 30 days.

While Cox could not be reached for comment, Peter Slen, an aide in his Washington office, said the congressman “supports family planning and a continuation of the federal role in family planning services and will be seeking ways to keep the abortion issue from interfering with this year’s program authorization and funding.”