Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) are community clinics that receive billions in public funding to provide a range of primary health services to medically underserved patients. Federally qualified health centers are required to serve all individuals, regardless of ability to pay. That means they exist in order to take care of some of the country’s poorest and most vulnerable patients.

House Speaker Paul Ryan says he wants to redirect Planned Parenthood’s funding to these centers, which he claims “provide the same kinds of services … without all of the controversy surrounding” abortion care.

Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health services both in the United States and globally. It is the largest single provider of reproductive health services, including abortion, in the U.S. More than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood health centers offer the full range of reversible, FDA-approved contraception, versus about half of FQHC sites, according to Guttmacher Institute. They also offer shorter wait times for initial birth control visits, greater availability of evening or weekend hours, greater access to on-site oral contraceptives, and same-day insertion of contraceptive implants.

According to an investigation done by Amy Littlefield at Rewire many of those FQHCs would deny certain services because of their religious beliefs. They identified five federally qualified health centers that deny contraceptive prescriptions as a matter of policy, citing Catholic doctrine. When Rewire called some federally qualified health centers posing as patients asking about family planning services, they received strange answers. For example Daughters of Charity Services of New Orleans’ representatives told Rewire “This is a Catholic facility, ma’am. They don’t believe in birth control.”

“We believe that [life] happens at conception and that we don’t want to be involved in any type of procedure that would be an abortion,” said David Sanford, CEO of GraceMed, an FQHC with 13 clinics in Wichita and Topeka, Kansas. Some of these clinics suggested Planned Parenthood as a solution. Together, all these centers operate health clinics in dozens of locations throughout the nation and collected $38 million in Affordable Care Act (ACA) grants last year alone.

Such a scenario “should be unthinkable,” Susan Berke Fogel of the National Health Law Program told Rewire. “It’s outrageous that birth control is even on the table when it is such an essential, basic health service for millions and millions of people.”

Photo Credits: Dudas de Mujer