Ipas and Abortion Morality Training
On the 27th of June, 2023, The IBP Network and the WHO Prevention of Unsafe Abortion Unit hosted a webinar on the WHO Clinical Practice Handbook for Quality Abortion Care. At the event, an Ipas Senior Advisor discussed their latest efforts to ensure widespread access to high-quality abortion care, emphasizing three pillars, one of which corresponds to their Values Clarification for Action and Transformation (VCAT) curriculum.
VCAT has been around for some time. As shared on their website, “For almost two decades, Ipas has conducted workshops around the world to encourage health providers, policymakers, and others to reflect on their values and attitudes toward abortion.” While the 2018 VCAT Introduction Report states that the curriculum “is not designed to change people’s values,” the program does exactly that. Ipas proudly shared various participant testimonies highlighting their success in changing the views of medical staff on abortion services.
Regardless of whether this was what Ipas planned all along, it is evident that value change is one of the main objectives of the curriculum and part of a global effort to reduce the number of healthcare workers whose philosophical and theological views differ from those of the pro-abortion movement. During the 27th of June event, the Ipas Senior Advisor admitted that the aim of the program is to “transform the beliefs and attitudes that impact [health workers’] behaviors.” The advisor also stressed that Ipas wants to ensure that they train and develop a class of what they deem to represent the “right kind” of medical staff.
While it is neither new nor uncommon for abortion organizations to engage in value transformation work in their grassroots programs, such endeavors are highly problematic as they rest on faulty assumptions of who has agency over what domain.
The opinion of medical professionals on abortion hinges on whether they consider abortion to be a moral or immoral act, and to discover whether that is the case is a project that intrinsically belongs to the realms of philosophy and theology, not medicine. While theology is clear on this subject, even from a completely secular perspective, it is ethics that prescribes the proper behavior and application of medical facts. Unless the questions of whether babies in the womb have a right to life and whether, if they do have such a right, it is still morally permissible to kill them, are addressed, the VCAT curriculum fails to treat the issue of abortion seriously.
Philosophers or theologians will never be invited to moderate and lead such workshops because the purpose of this curriculum is not to help participants discover or clarify moral truth. Yet, oddly enough, the curriculum still attempts to change moral views.
During the event, a representative from the Reproductive Health Training Center of Moldova stressed the importance of WHO’s efforts to include training modules on safe abortion at medical colleges and universities. Whether those modules will include the VCAT curriculum and to what extent it will infiltrate the wider education curriculum are questions worthy of consideration. The Ipas advisor announced that they are working toward an updated version of the VCAT curriculum to be released by the end of this year.
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