What does Planned Parenthood really do? What do they actually stand for? President and founder of Live Action, Lila Rose, lays out everything you need to know about Planned Parenthood.
Full Transcript
Imagine there’s an organization that claims to stand for one thing, but actually stands for another.
Imagine this organization calls itself a “health care provider,” but it’s not involved in preserving life; it’s involved in ending it.
And imagine that you help finance this organization – whether you want to or not.
Well, you don’t have to imagine. This organization exists. And it has a name with which you are very familiar. It calls itself “Planned Parenthood,” and the deception begins right there. Planned Parenthood doesn’t help people plan for parenthood; it helps people escape it.
And that’s only the start of its deceptions.
Planned Parenthood tells you it’s one of the nation’s “leading women’s health care providers,” but it provides very little healthcare.
It tells you it provides adoption referrals, but the only adoption advice it is likely to offer is, “Google it.”
Most deceptive of all, Planned Parenthood tells you that abortions are a small part of what it does, but it performs more abortions than anyone else in America.
Here are the facts.
The folks who run Planned Parenthood boast that they provide life-saving cancer screenings. And they do. Just not that many of them – less than 2% of the nation’s screenings each year.
They talk about providing breast exams. They do, but just not that many of them—again, less 2% of the nation’s total.
They talk about providing ultrasounds, but the last thing they want to do is show a pregnant woman an image of her growing child. So, they don’t. The ultrasound is only for Planned Parenthood’s use—to better facilitate patients’ abortions.
In other words, abortion – not women’s health – is Planned Parenthood’s reason for being.
Every year it does more than a third of all abortions in America—over 321,000 of them. That’s equivalent to every inhabitant of St. Louis or Pittsburgh – wiped out, every year. That’s over 880 abortions every day. An abortion every 98 seconds.
And while the number of total abortions in the United States is going down, Planned Parenthood’s market share of abortions has increased from 23% in 2006 to 34% in 2016.
So, when Planned Parenthood says it’s devoted to women’s reproductive rights, what it means is it’s devoted to aborting as many babies as possible.
And here’s the biggest deception of them all: Planned Parenthood would like you to believe that abortion is only 3% of the total services they provide.
Three percent. Doesn’t sound like very much, does it?
But here’s how they get to that 3%: They count every “discrete clinical interaction” as its own service. What is a “discrete clinical interaction”? Pretty much anything you do from the moment you walk into one of their clinics.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say a woman comes into Planned Parenthood for one service—an abortion. Before providing an abortion, Planned Parenthood has to confirm that the woman is pregnant, right? So, they administer another service—a pregnancy test. That’s two services! Then, after the abortion, on your way out the door, they hand you a prescription. That’s three services!
And there are many other services provided during the abortion process that Planned Parenthood claims as “discrete clinical interactions.”
In this way, Planned Parenthood is able to rack up 9.5 million of these so-called “services” each year. Divide the number of abortions—321,000—by 9.5 million, and you get 3%. Even the Washington Post, a Planned Parenthood ally, declared this 3% figure “very misleading.”
Rich Lowry of National Review nicely illustrated this phony statistic: It would be like Major League Baseball saying they sell 20 million hot dogs, but only play 2,430 games, so baseball is only .012% of what they do.
So, why does Planned Parenthood engage in all these deceptions?
Well, as they say, follow the money. According to federal law, the United States government is not permitted to spend taxpayer money on abortions. But Planned Parenthood receives over $500 million a year in federal funding. Not for abortions, mind you. But for those other “discreet clinical interactions.”
Over the last 10 years, its annual clientele has dropped 23%—almost a quarter. But during this time, its taxpayer funding has skyrocketed from $336 million in 2006 to $543 million in 2016.
The reality is, just about everything about Planned Parenthood is a deception. Its purpose, its funding, its very name.
That’s why Planned Parenthood’s biggest enemy isn’t conservatives or religious people. Its biggest enemy is truth.
I’m Lila Rose founder and President of Live Action for Prager University.
