Donald Trump has clarified that, as president, he would defund Planned Parenthood because it commits abortions. At the same time, however, he insists that “We have to look at the positives also for Planned Parenthood.”
No matter how many “services” Planned Parenthood says it provides, nothing changes the fact that almost 900 preborn children die each day in America’s largest abortion chain.
If one is opposed to the intentional taking of innocent human life, one can’t turn around and praise Planned Parenthood for the other things it does. That’s like excusing child labor in the 1800s and 1900s by saying, “I'm opposed to child labor, but those textile companies do produce nice clothes.”
It’s also a false choice that we must accept that Planned Parenthood kills over 320,000 children each year because it also provides other services. The real choice is between Planned Parenthood and over 13,000 community health care clinics and hospitals across America that provide better and much more comprehensive health care to women but that don’t kill children in the process. (Women can find the centers closest to them by visiting
GetYourCare.org.)
Mr. Trump also echoed Planned Parenthood’s talking point that abortion is a “fairly small part” of what it does. Planned Parenthood has long stated that abortions “only” make up three percent of its services.
But even abortion advocate the Washington Post has noted that Planned Parenthood’s calculation absurdly equates the major procedure of an abortion with a minor service like a urine test. The Post gave the claim a “three Pinocchios” rating -- acknowledging how misleading the abortion group's “three percent” line was. While many of Planned Parenthood’s services are taxpayer subsidized, the abortion business is a moneymaker for the chain, and it charges several hundred to over a thousand dollars per abortion.
Whenever Planned Parenthood gets questioned about its over 320,000 abortions a year, it changes the subject to breast exams. The fact is, the abortion giant’s own numbers show that in any one year, it provides breast exams to less than one percent of the reproductive-age women in the United States. That means 99 percent of women are going somewhere else. So why is Planned Parenthood touted as necessary by so many politicians? Most American women have already voted with their feet and gone elsewhere.
In addition, Planned Parenthood has lied for years about the breast exams it provides. Until Live Action exposed the lie in its 2011 Mammosham investigation, Planned Parenthood repeatedly claimed that it provided mammograms. And in 2015, in testimony before Congress, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards was forced to admit under oath that the chain doesn’t perform mammograms at all.
The fact is, Planned Parenthood is neither good nor necessary.
Mr. Trump and all those running for office need to take a few minutes to watch some of Live Action’s investigations into Planned Parenthood to see that. They will see woman after woman lied to about how developed her child in the womb is -- told that her baby is just a clump of cells and can’t feel pain. They will see women lied to about the real medical risks of abortion – even at facilities that had recently sent women to emergency rooms after botched abortions. They will hear Planned Parenthood staffers enthusiastically agree to take money to abort Black children and agree to abort a baby because she was a girl when the mother wanted a boy instead.
They will also see when our undercover investigators went into several Planned Parenthood facilities across the country posing as human traffickers prostituting girls as young as 13 years old. Planned Parenthood staffers repeatedly told us on camera that they could provide abortions if the girls got pregnant. They were willing to aid and abet the traffickers and never bothered to report them to law enforcement.
And just last summer, Planned Parenthood was caught on camera by the Center for Medical Progress negotiating the sale of baby parts from its abortions. It allegedly altered the abortion procedure to procure more "intact specimens" -- in the words of one Planned Parenthood abortionist -- putting mothers at risk so it could harvest more organs to sell.
These are the facts candidates should be talking about; they shouldn’t be repeating the lies and talking points of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar corporation that pays millions of dollars for advertising each year to convince us that it cares about women. But candidates need to look at Planned Parenthood’s record rather than simply buy into its rhetoric. Then they need stand up for the lives of preborn children and their mothers who are lied to and preyed upon when they are most vulnerable. That is a constituency every candidate, regardless of party, should be eager to represent.
Lila Rose is the president of Live Action, a new media nonprofit dedicated to ending abortion.
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