With President Donald Trump’s vocal support of defunding Planned Parenthood, along with a House and Senate with Republican majorities, the likelihood of the abortion chain losing its government funding has become a real possibility. Planned Parenthood itself knows this, as its letters to supporters have gone into fear mode. Planned Parenthood President, Cecile Richards, penned a fundraising note to supporters on December 18 that said in part:
We’re just weeks away from a frightening, unprecedented moment…. We don’t know exactly what President Trump will do when he takes office, but if we take him at his word, we can expect some of the worst threats to reproductive rights and health care we’ve ever faced.
Make sure we’re ready for the fight of our lives
More aptly stated, it’s a fight for babies’ lives. And defunding the abortion corporation is one critical step in that process of saving lives. Ultimately, the nation will benefit when Planned Parenthood is defunded. And the ways that will happen are clear to see when not looking through a lens of abortion:
1. Uninsured and low-income women will have greater access to all health care.
This is the opposite of what the abortion giant leads people to believe will happen if Planned Parenthood is defunded. However, the reality is that when Planned Parenthood is defunded, that money will not go away; rather, it will be rerouted to Federally Qualified Health Centers. As Live Action has previously reported, these FQHCs provide all the medical services, apart from abortion, that Planned Parenthood offers, but they also offer more comprehensive health care. Additionally, there are thousands of FQHCs in the nation, but fewer than 700 Planned Parenthood locations. Everywhere a woman might seek out a Planned Parenthood, she can find a FQHC. But women will benefit even more, because women in rural areas — where Planned Parenthood doesn’t have facilities because there is less opportunity for profit — there are FQHCs, so women don’t need to travel to the nearest major city (like they do to receive Planned Parenthood’s limited services); they need only to go to one of the thousands of FQHCs located all over the nation. And unlike Planned Parenthood, which has been shown to give patients medically inaccurate information in order to convince women to have abortions, women at these FQHCs can be assured they will receive quality, accurate medical care from those without a stake in their decision.
A photo of the clinics that outnumber Planned Parenthood 20 to 1.
2. Planned Parenthood commits human and civil rights violations.
Americans cannot thrive in the land of the free when their tax money goes to a government-supported organization that uses its position to violate human rights and twist its medical front into a profit center for fetal parts brokering.
The human rights violations of the abortion chain have been detailed for year. The most obvious, of course, is that Planned Parenthood snuffs out the life of a unique human being each time it commits an abortion. Denying a human a right to be born is the most egregious of all violations. A unique human being with its own DNA is simply a profit margin for the abortion chain.
Additionally, investigations from the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives revealed that in order to gain this profit, Planned Parenthood was willing to violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). So iron clad are these regulations of privacy, that even a husband and wife have to sign release papers to disclose health information to the spouse. Yet Planned Parenthood has shown it will violate HIPAA laws in its work to sell fetal parts. As the Panel noted in its complaint letter to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last June:
The key to understanding the HIPAA and consent violations that we’ve referred to HHS is that there’s a business contract between StemExpress and the abortion clinics under which both sides make a profit from the baby body parts inside the young woman’s womb. The contract changes the way both entities view the young woman: her baby is now a profit-center. This betrayal of a young woman’s trust should disgust us all. It takes financial advantage, obtains consent through coercion, and deceives the woman, all in violation of federal privacy laws.
This resulted in the Panel asking for “a swift and full investigation from the Office of Civil Rights” in the HHS.
3. Planned Parenthood has a history of rampant Medicaid fraud.
As Live Action News reported in 2015:
[P]ro-life legal group Alliance Defending Freedom released a damaging new report outlining Planned Parenthood’s fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars. The report outlines how 45 public audits of Planned Parenthood affiliates, along with 57 audits of state family planning programs, found waste, fraud, and abuse to the tune of $129.7 million.
Among the findings the Charlotte Lozier Institute named in a report this month, entitled, “Profit. No Matter What,” are a host of overbilling and fraudulent errors. CLI lists them (the entire report may be accessed here):
- There are 51 known external audits or other reviews of Planned Parenthood affiliates’ financial data and practices: two in California, one in Connecticut, one in Illinois, two in Louisiana, one in Maine, one in Nebraska, seven in New York State, one in Ohio, three in Oklahoma, two in Texas, three in Washington State, and 27 in Wisconsin. Nearly all of the audits have found overbilling. All audits are summarized in the paper.
- The audits found numerous improper practices resulting in significant Title XIX-Medicaid overpayments of more than $8.5 million to Planned Parenthood affiliates for family planning and reproductive health services claims.
- Of the 42 audits of Planned Parenthood for which dates covered are known, as much as $5.2 million was overbilled in one audited year in a single audit; the average overbilled amount per audited year in a single audit was more than $94,000.
- Three federal audits specifically identify Planned Parenthood – and only Planned Parenthood – as the problem in state family planning program overbilling.
- Auditors and investigators have specifically identified Planned Parenthood affiliates as the source of at least $12.8 million in waste, abuse, and potentially fraudulent overbilling and penalties. Former Planned Parenthood employees and others allege many millions more.
- The federal audits have detailed “unbundling” or “fragmentation” billing schemes related to pre-abortion examinations, counseling visits, and other services performed in conjunction with an abortion, and improper billing for the abortions themselves. In New York alone during one four-year audit period, it appeared that hundreds of thousands of abortion-related claims were billed unlawfully to Medicaid.
- Overbilling found in audits of state family planning programs amounted to more than $123.8 million.
4. Planned Parenthood has a history of breaking the law in general.
It doesn’t have to be overbilling or Medicaid fraud for Planned Parenthood to pounce on getting its own way, regardless of what the law says. Besides the fetal parts selling exposed in 2015, Live Action News detailed the specific ways Planned Parenthood has broken several laws. When an organization is garnering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while violating the law, it takes money from several law-abiding organizations that could use the taxpayer dollars legally.
The abortion chain, Live Action News notes, has been involved in several obvious violations of both federal and state law:
- Killing babies who survive abortion attempts
- Selling baby body parts for profit
- Changing the abortion procedure for the purpose of collecting body parts
- Knowing that a particular baby who is being aborted is also being harvested for organs and parts
- Committing illegal partial-birth abortions
- Breaking state laws on abortion limits and health regulations
- Criminal conspiracy
5. Planned Parenthood has covered up sexual abuse and sex trafficking.
America’s young women are anything but safe in the hands of Planned Parenthood. The only thing the abortion chain holds closely in its hands is money, even if an underage girl is being trafficked or abused.
A Live Action investigation showed workers at eight different Planned Parenthood locations in six states that were willing to cover up sexual abuse, including “disregarding mandatory reporting laws of suspected statutory rape. Facilities also provided instructions on how to circumvent parental consent laws.”
In 2011, a Live Action investigation showed Planned Parenthood workers at various locations around the nation how to cover up sex trafficking, even when talking with the pimp and the underage girl. Workers told them how to lie about their age and maneuver the system to their advantage.
Planned Parenthood claimed to be retraining its staff to spot sexual abuse, but a new Live Action investigation that followed up on the 2011 investigations revealed that Planned Parenthood was doing a different kind of staff training:
… [I]n a new interview with Live Action president Lila Rose, former Sherman, TX, Planned Parenthood manager Ramona Treviño said that instead of helping employees identify and report potential abuse, the training sessions instructed staff how to identify undercover journalists and whether they were being recorded.
“That experience for me left me so disgusted that I couldn’t see how Planned Parenthood could ever redeem themselves after that,” Treviño said after attending one of the highly publicized training seminars in 2011.
Additionally, Live Action’s new follow up investigation also checked the abortion chain’s claim that it had been in contact with authorities to identify the traffickers who visited its facilities in those investigations. That claim proved false:
In 2015 and 2016, Live Action made a series of Freedom of Information Act records requests of law enforcement and child protective services in the states and cities where the alleged trafficking occurred. The responses show that out of five states and Washington, D.C., only one state — Arizona — had responsive records showing Planned Parenthood reported anything to authorities.
Especially problematic is the fact that:
Research shows that about 30 percent of actual sex trafficking victims come in contact with Planned Parenthood facilities. If Planned Parenthood is failing to report these real incidents to authorities, these victims may be losing any chance to escape their abusers.
In actuality, Americans are far better off without Planned Parenthood if the abortion chain spends so much energy on hiding and covering up crime instead of helping the young girls who are victims of crimes.
The real question for President Trump and Congress is not whether or not to defund Planned Parenthood, but how quickly it can be done so Americans can get real medical care and do it with an assurance of safety.
