Underneath the guise of women’s health, Planned Parenthood has a unified mission: Abortion on demand, without apology–at the expense of the taxpayer. Here are five things you need to know about the nation’s largest abortion chain:
1. Abortion is Planned Parenthood’s number one priority.
Don’t be fooled by their reports that abortion is “only three percent” of their business. This is 100 percent false. As Rich Lowry explained in a New York Post article last year, their twisting of statistics is creative, but flawed:
The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services.
So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.
By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.
This video from Live Action explains the lie further.
2. Planned Parenthood doesn’t have mechanisms in place to help pregnant women who want to stay pregnant and need prenatal care.
Despite its claims it offers prenatal services and is all about women’s health, story after story shows that when a woman actually wants to keep her baby, the only way Planned Parenthood helps her is to verify her pregnancy and then refer her to an outside OB-GYN or community clinic. Addison found this out the hard way when she had a surprise pregnancy and went to Planned Parenthood to find help since she was a poor college student. The only help the abortion chain would offer her was abortion. “We don’t have doctors for pregnant women,” they told her.
Brooke, a Planned Parenthood medical assistant in Santa Ana, CA told Live Action News recently: “We offered no parenting classes or even knew where to send someone who wanted that. At the time I was there, Planned Parenthood, we had no resources to give to continuing parents.”
And when another woman called this summer seeking prenatal care at that same Santa Ana facility, she was told she could get an appointment where they would help her get set up on Medi-Cal and “refer her out” to an OB/GYN for her regular check ups. This, of course, is not prenatal care. It’s being a middle-man that allows them to provide a legitimate service and then pocket some government money for providing it. This is the same tactic it uses with its “breast health services.”
3. Planned Parenthood has never done a mammogram, and the self-breast exams can be done by women at home for free.
For a while, Planned Parenthood tried to convince people it did mammograms. What Planned Parenthood has always done, however, is a routine breast exam. If a problem is suspected by feeling the woman’s breasts for lumps–in the same manner a woman can do herself–the abortion giant can then give the woman a voucher to go to a place that actually provides mammograms. Eventually, the rhetoric changed to “cancer screening,” as the abortion provider was outed for not doing mammograms. One Live Action investigation helped expose this:
[A] Live Action actor calls 30 Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 different states, inquiring about mammograms at Planned Parenthood. Every Planned Parenthood, without exception, tells her she will have to go elsewhere for a mammogram, and many clinics admit that no Planned Parenthood clinics provide this breast cancer screening procedure. “We don’t provide those services whatsoever,” admits a staffer at Planned Parenthood of Arizona. Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health Center clinic in Overland Park, KS explains to the caller, “We actually don’t have a, um, mammogram machine, at our clinics.”
Before Congress in September, 2015, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards admitted that the abortion business has never provided mammograms, despite popular opinion and previous claims by Planned Parenthood. The myth, spearheaded by Ms. Richards, has been told again and again by Planned Parenthood’s supporters—even by President Obama.
The bottom line is that while Planned Parenthood can give a woman a voucher for a free mammogram, a woman can be seen faster by going directly for a clinic that provides mammograms–a bypass that may end up saving her life. As a reminder, there are thousands of Federally Qualified Health Centers where poor or uninsured women can receive a range of all health care services–including mammograms.
4. Planned Parenthood routinely gets caught breaking the law.
Planned Parenthood has been exposed time and again for breaking the law. One Live Action investigation on Planned Parenthood’s complicity in sex trafficking revealed that “seven Planned Parenthood clinics in four different states were willing to aid and abet the sex-trafficking of minor girls by supplying confidential birth control, STD testing, and secret abortions to underage girls and their traffickers.”
Live Action also exposed that the abortion chain was willing to cover up sexual abuse. Live Action reported: “Investigations found eight Planned Parenthood clinics in five different states were willing to cover-up sexual abuse, disregarding mandatory suspected statutory rape reporting laws. Clinics also provided instructions on how to circumvent parental consent laws.
Of course, The Center for Medical Progress blew away any doubts that the abortion chain had altruistic motives when last summer it exposed the abortion giant’s motives to obtain aborted baby parts for use in research. While the abortion giant denied making any profit from its human fetal tissue dealings, it’s become clear there is profit involved. In fact, a congressional committee has been investigating the abortion chain’s wrongdoing since last summer and has found several indicators of questionable legal issues regarding human fetal tissue practices related to the nation’s abortion facilities. One name that appears throughout the committee’s investigation is Planned Parenthood, as indicated in this report.
5. They charge more for the services they do provide than you would pay for the same service at a real health clinic. And they over-bill the government for it, too.
The abortion chain routinely over-billed Medicaid for its costs, and even admitted it last year. A former Planned Parenthood employee, Sue Thayer, filed a lawsuit against her former employer. Alliance Defending Freedom, who represented her, reported:
Sue found out that Planned Parenthood does whatever it can to cut costs and raise revenue—particularly on the abortion and birth control side of the business. After contracting with drug companies to purchase birth control pills at a bulk discount of about $2.98 per one 28-day cycle, Planned Parenthood would bill Medicaid for $35 and be reimbursed about $26. And, without reporting it to Medicaid, they would also collect a “donation” from the woman to help offset the cost of the “free contraception.” But double-dipping in the profit of birth control still wasn’t enough.
It’s apparent that profit is the motivation behind everything Planned Parenthood does. It behooves the abortion chain to offer “cancer screenings” and other legitimate services because they can bill Medicaid for the costs–and over-bill Medicaid, by its own admission.
As Addison found out when she made her troubling visit to Planned Parenthood, uninsured and unwilling to consider abortion, the costs for Planned Parenthood’s services weren’t reduced. She didn’t have Medicaid, and the abortion provider charged her $70 to cover the cost of the blood test she needed to verify her pregnancy, even while they were unwilling to provide her with prenatal care. There weren’t freebies for her. There’s no such thing as a freebie at the nation’s largest abortion chain. Someone has to pay for it, whether it’s a $70 pregnancy test to young Addison, or birth control pills billed to Medicaid at a $20-plus dollar profit for Planned Parenthood at taxpayer expense.
Planned Parenthood has veiled its narrative with phrases that sound appealing, dropping lines about “women’s health” and using the tagline “Care. No matter what.” But the truth behind the pink washed abortion provider is that the only service the really care about is abortion. Perhaps a better tagline would be “Abortion. Profit no matter what.”
