Franz Theard; An Abortion Provider Playing Both Sides

Du·al·ism

noun: dualism; plural noun: dualisms

1. the division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided.

Dr. Franz Theard lives a double life. While one day he is providing prenatal and delivery care to women with high-risk pregnancies in Texas, the next he is performing elective abortions just across the Texas/New Mexico state line. One of his facilities provides ultrasound, prenatal care, and full range obstetrics. The other provides both medically induced and surgically performed abortions.

Patients trust Dr. Theard to have the best interest of their baby at heart. They trust him to keep their babies alive and growing. Dr. Theard aids new life in its delivery and knows exactly how that life came to be over the previous 40 weeks. Women have acknowledged him as a good doctor who truly helped them through their pregnancy and postpartum journeys.

Do those patients realize they’re trusting a doctor who would just as quickly take their money to end their baby’s life as he did to deliver their baby alive? Franz Theard cannot have the safety and well-being of patients as a priority when he is performing such hypocritical services for profit.

Even the websites for Dr. Theard's facilities display a strategic message in the presentation. The prenatal care facility presents itself as supportive and joyful. His abortion facility shows no such sign of supportive kindness; just a woman sad and all alone.

The abortion facility he runs in New Mexico is known to be a place of chaos and conflict.

One such conflict recently became public when the facility’s security guard filmed himself harassing sidewalk advocates before following a single young lady from the facility to her job to leave a note on her windshield. Women, both patients and sidewalk advocates, have stated that the facility is simply not a safe place for women to be.

There has to be some concern or questioning when a doctor who clearly understands the value of a life saved would be so quick also to end lives. It can’t simply be his belief that abortion is inclusive healthcare, or he would provide abortions at his fully inclusive pregnancy care clinic...but he doesn’t.

Theard separates his work because he realizes that women coming to him for life-saving care for their baby would lose trust for him if they were one room over from where he is ending an unborn baby’s life through a surgical dismemberment abortion. He knows there is moral and ethical conflict in saving one baby just to kill the next. He knows in order to profit from pregnant women in every way possible, he has to separate his saving from his killing.

So he does.

Women seeking prenatal care should second guess their choice to trust Theard to see their baby as a life worth caring for. Women seeking an abortion should second guess their choice to trust a man who provides their services separately from other women’s services—segregating them to protect his profits and reputation. Clearly, even he sees abortion as a grime service, or he’d promote it as beautifully and publicly as he promotes his prenatal care services.

There should be a higher standard for doctors who are said to be experts in high-risk pregnancy management. If a doctor is willing to kill an unborn baby for profit, that doctor should not be trusted with the lives of other unborn babies.

Franz Theard needs to decide who he is.

Is he the life-saving, women helping, prenatal and delivery care provider? Or is he the life-ending, women exploiting abortion provider?

He should no longer get to be both.

-Op-ed by Jamie Jeffries