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Have you ever known — really known, deep in your gut — that a woman sitting in front of you needed something today, and then realized the only thing standing in your way was a sentence somebody typed into a policy manual years ago?
That’s the question Connie Ambrecht, RDMS, CEO of Sparrow Solutions Group, put on the table this month at Webinar Wednesday — and honestly, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Connie has spent more than 25 years serving pregnancy centers — hands-on sonography training, board work, executive director coaching, client services. She spent about a decade with NIFLA overseeing their hands-on training before God widened the assignment. She describes it in the plainest possible way, and I love that:
“My life is spent in the trenches, just like you.”
She’s not theorizing. She’s telling you what she’s seen.
Connie opened by asking everyone on the call to guess something: what percentage of pregnant women today have no risk factors at all — no risk of termination, no complications, nothing?
The answers came fast in the chat. Zero. One. Ten. Fifteen.
Nobody guessed high. Everybody in that room, from their own experience, already knew.
And that’s Connie’s starting point. If almost no pregnancy is risk-free, then almost every pregnancy benefits from starting with you. She calls it a life-affirming launch — and she means it literally.
“Can you imagine every pregnancy in your community getting a start with you and your team?”
She contrasted it with the average OB visit, which we all know is fast. Efficient, but fast. What a pregnancy center has that a busy OB office doesn’t is time. Time to assess. Time to listen. Time to walk with her.
That hit me — because it reframes the early scan question entirely. It stops being can we see anything yet and becomes what does she need from us right now.
Here’s where she got direct — and where I think a lot of centers are going to want to pull their medical director into the room.
Her position, built on 25 years of doing this work and training the people who do it: the AIUM — the body that sets professional ultrasound standards — does not name a gestational age for when to begin scanning or when to stop. Not five weeks three days. Not six weeks one day. No number at all.
What it counts on instead, she says, is assessment. The trained professional on site, looking at the patient in front of her, deciding what that patient needs.
“The AIUM does not tell us a gestational age. That’s what they’re counting on — assessment.”
So where do all those specific cutoffs come from? Connie’s answer is: our own policies. Somewhere along the way, “we’ll usually see a heartbeat around six weeks” — a true, useful clinical observation — hardened into a rule. And a rule isn’t an assessment. It’s a checkbox.
She was gentle but clear about the cost of that. Policies were written to guide us. When they stop being guides and start being gates, they can keep a nurse from doing the very thing her credential, her training, and her judgment are telling her to do.
She’s the first to say you may not agree with all of it — she told the room as much up front. But she’s earned the right to make the case, and it’s worth bringing to your medical director rather than leaving on the table.
If you want to understand the urgency here, Connie has a story.
She ordered the abortion pill herself. She wanted to see how it arrives.
It came quickly. The return address on the package was an empty lot in her own town. On the back, the instructions told the woman to seek medical advice — and then, further down, told her that if she ends up at the hospital, don’t tell them what you took.
Sit with that for a second. A woman is bleeding, frightened, in an emergency department, and she has been coached into silence. The provider treating her has no idea what he’s looking at. And she is alone with it.
Estimates put a large share of early abortions in the medication category now, and Connie’s point is blunt: our biggest issue isn’t the clinic down the street anymore. It’s the mailbox.
If a woman crosses your path on a Tuesday and picks up pills on Saturday, and she’s four weeks along — the question of whether your policy lets you scan her isn’t administrative. It’s the whole thing.
This was my favorite practical piece of the hour, and it costs nothing to implement.
Instead of reciting what’s happening at four weeks, Connie hands the moment back to the patient. Get out your phone. Look up what’s going on at four weeks gestation.
It takes about thirty seconds. And what she finds is a lot — hormones, cell layers, the support system forming, her body already changing.
Then Connie asks her: is that a lot, or a little?
Every time, the answer is a lot. And here’s the thing — she said it. Not the nurse. Not the brochure. Her.
“What happens when people say things? Does it increase ownership? Yes. We all know it increases ownership.”
Then the same move again: now look up what an ultrasound looks like at four weeks. So she walks into the scan already knowing she’ll see a gestational sac, not a baby-shaped silhouette. No disappointment. No confusion. Just accurate expectations she built herself.
That’s not a technique. That’s respect. And it’s exactly what we try to do in marketing, too — meet a woman where her questions actually are, in the words she’d actually use, instead of talking over her with what we wish she’d ask.
Connie hears this one constantly. Her answer flips it: there’s a lot going on at four weeks. The patient just told you so.
She was careful here, and I want to be careful repeating it. Scanning early doesn’t mean scanning once. It means she comes back — sooner rather than later, because a week matters enormously this early. It means the ectopic conversation happens, with a handout and a highlighter and teach-back, not a rushed recital at the door. It means official results with the physician’s read, not a preliminary look treated as final.
And it means knowing who on your team is prepared for the slow, patient work of looking for a three- or four-week gestational sac.
Assessment first. Always. Then the scan serves the assessment — not a number in a binder.
Does this mean every center should scan at four weeks? No. Connie’s ask is smaller and harder: read your own policy and find out whether it’s making the decision for your team. If your nurse has to call the medical director every single time she wants to exercise judgment, that’s worth examining.
What about the woman who isn’t abortion-minded at all? Connie made room for her too. A woman who’s had three miscarriages and comes in the day she misses her period isn’t at risk of terminating — but her emotional state absolutely affects her pregnancy, and that’s a real clinical consideration. Sometimes the right assessment is not today — one client decided she’d rather come back with someone beside her. That’s a good outcome too.
Where do we even start? Several people on the call were already doing it — one is building a QI study to support a policy change. Connie loved that. Put the problem on a big sticky note instead of answering it on the spot, and you end up with a healthier organization.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Every one of us wants to be the place a woman lands before she makes the decision, not after. Connie’s message is that sometimes we’re the ones holding the door shut — and we can open it.
Who — or what topic — would you like to hear more about? Tell us. We build these webinars for you, and your answer genuinely shapes what comes next.
Want to connect with Connie? Sparrow Solutions Group offers trainings on motivational interviewing, early scans and standards, and building an annual pregnancy loss memorial event.
Connie Ambrecht, RDMS — CEO, Sparrow Solutions Group [email protected] | sparrowsolutionsgroup.com 2620 Regatta Dr., Suite 102, Las Vegas, NV 89128 Office: 702-556-1102 | Mobile: 702-556-1101
And if you’re sitting there thinking your center’s story deserves to be told better than it’s being told right now — that’s our whole job. Schedule a meeting with me and let’s talk it through. No pitch, I promise. Just a conversation.
Let’s keep walking together — one policy, one patient, one heartbeat at a time. 💜
— Sandy MacNaughton, Strategic Director of Client Success, iRapture.com
