Dear Tennessee Legislator:

My name is Lila Rose and I am the young woman who went undercover in to the Memphis Planned Parenthood and created the YouTube video of the sexual abuse cover up I found at the clinic.

You can read about more about this here:
http://liveaction.org/newsroom/042009_tennesse_planned_parenthood_14_lie.html

I am very pleased to hear that the Tennessee legislature has moved to reduce taxpayer subsidies to Planned Parenthood. However, I would like to respond to a number of points raised in an email by Barry Chase, CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Greater Memphis Region, disputing the relevance of the results of my organization's undercover investigation. It is my hope that both the footage of Planned Parenthood covering up the sexual abuse of young girls and the organization's subsequent denial and indifference will assist you and inform you as you work on behalf of the residents of your state.

To begin with, let me clarify two issues:

First, while Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis claims they have "asked, unsuccessfully" for "unedited" copies of our footage, we have never received a request for the raw footage by Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis. They have been making this false assertion since the start of our media release.

Second, last Monday, we sent the full undercover footage to the Shelby County District Attorney's office. They will determine whether laws were broken and confirm the veracity of our recording. You can view the unedited footage, the original video, and press documentation on our website, LiveAction.org.

In his email, Mr. Chase tries to pass blame by claiming that the employee in the video, who identifies herself as "Marie," was not properly trained. The question at hand, however, concerns not whether some or any employees at Planned Parenthood are properly trained, but whether they are practicing, in private counseling sessions, the same policies that they profess to the public.

In our undercover video, "Marie" demonstrates a clear knowledge of the legal boundaries to abortion. The video shows that she is familiar with the process for obtaining a waiver from a judge to the parental consent requirement for abortion (which Mr. Chase incorrectly calls a parental notification law). Marie then deliberately uses her familiarity with the system to forestall the judge from finding out about the statutory rapist. The Planned Parenthood counselor has created a perfect storm for ensuring that the statutory rapist is never found out: the parents will never find out about the pregnancy, the judge will never find out about the statutory rapist, and Planned Parenthood will never again mention either.

It is all the more troubling to think that even a supposed novice counselor at Planned Parenthood would know to recommend this law-evasion strategy. How prevalent must law-evasion be at Planned Parenthood clinics when even the "interpreters" are implicated? We have taped employees, mostly counselors, from six clinics covering up the sexual abuse of children in exactly the same manner. Previous studies have found over 90% of Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide willing to do so as well. This is an ingrained pattern in the operations of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.

With this in mind, consider the response of citizens without special training or prerogative upon learning about statutory rape situations. Responsible citizens automatically know to tell proper authorities about even their slightest suspicions of sexual abuse of young girls, because the crime is too deplorable to overlook. However, when Planned Parenthood employees have a professed victim reveal abuse explicitly, they not only fail to report it, but proactively take measures to hide it. The problem, it follows, is not from an absence of training, but the presence of a more fundamental perversion, a blind tolerance of statutory rape in the service of a careless abortion-first mentality.

Sincerely,

Lila Rose
President, Live Action
LiveAction.org