WASHINGTON — Baltimore resident Annie Sageng relied on Planned Parenthood for many different reasons while growing up.
In high school, she drove her friends there to pick up birth control and pregnancy tests. Eventually she was the one picking up the birth control. Then she was a volunteer. Now, the 28-year-old is the Maryland Planned Parenthood community outreach coordinator.
“It was always there as something we can all depend on, as a nonjudgmental source, as a nonjudgmental place that we could go,” Sageng said. “Especially now, it helps me feel like there’s somewhere to turn and there’s something to do,” she said.
Although President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to defund Planned Parenthood as long as it provides abortions, several of Maryland’s Democratic lawmakers said that despite their party’s minority status in Congress, they will fight every effort to do so.
“This will be an ongoing battle,” Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic congressman who was elected to the Senate last month, said in an interview with Capital News Service. “It’s unfortunate that in the 21st century we’re still having to wage this battle, but we will fight tooth and nail to prevent Donald Trump and the Republicans from turning back the clock on women’s rights.”
Maryland Planned Parenthood typically receives 100 donations per week. In the week after Republican nominee Trump’s surprising election victory, it received 1,700 online donations, 350 of which were made in Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s name, according to spokeswoman Dana Robinson.
“Planned Parenthood has done very good work for millions of women,” Trump said at a Florida press conference in March. “But we’re not going to allow, and we’re not going to fund, as long as you have the abortion going on at Planned Parenthood.”
Maryland Planned Parenthood CEO and President Karen Nelson said in an interview with Capital News Service that there are definite anxieties among women worried they will lose their birth control after inauguration. Maryland has seven Planned Parenthood locations that offer abortions, birth control, care for sexually transmitted diseases and general health care. Sixty percent of her patients do not receive health care outside of Planned Parenthood, Nelson said.
“We’re telling people to continue to enroll in the Affordable Care Act, and continue to make the appointments with us to get their birth control,” Nelson said. “We’re going to be there for them.”
Van Hollen and Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat, said their constituents have expressed concern about the future of women’s health care in Maryland.
