How abortion chain Planned Parenthood masquerades as a health care provider

Planned Parenthood and friends continually claim that abortion is only a small percentage of the organization’s services (three percent), and that their business is mainly about providing healthcare. But if we dissect Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual reports, another story emerges. This story goes back nearly two decades, to when the organization began gradually adding in various “services” to its annual reports. I found several interesting tidbits in the ‘wayback machine’ of Planned Parenthood’s reports, which I’ll review later. But first on the list…

Fetal Tissue Donation

While Planned Parenthood has been in the news for the past year and a half regarding its role in the trafficking of fetal body parts, one thing they have never shied away from is how proud they are of their participation in fetal tissue donation. In reviewing the abortion chain’s past annual reports, it appears Planned Parenthood has been boasting of its fetal tissue donation program as far back as the year 2000.

The American public has only recently become aware of Planned Parenthood’s horrific fetal tissue research program. In 2015, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) exposed the gruesome way the abortion business harvests the body parts of the babies they abort. Live Action News previously documented that Planned Parenthood’s abortion rate was higher at centers who were part of the scandal. As a result of CMP’s investigative reporting, a Congressional investigation was opened. The Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives found that the abortion business, which receives half a billion in federal tax dollars a year, violated several laws, prompting a Senate Judiciary Committee to recommend Planned Parenthood Federation of America and four Planned Parenthood affiliates to the FBI and the Department of Justice for criminal referrals regarding their fetal tissue practices and transfers.

What the public may be unaware of is that the fetal tissue donation program was actually mentioned in Planned Parenthood’s 2000-2001 annual report.

It is well known that by 2000, Planned Parenthood was fully absorbed in the practice of donating – as they called it – parts of aborted babies for research, which might explain why the organization appears to boast about their fetal tissue project, writing that their national staff are “recognized authorities on all aspects of reproductive health” and that they had in that past year “coordinated 61 new affiliate services and approved a range of new medical services at the 2000 PPFA National Medical Committee Meeting including those related to… fetal tissue donation.”

In addition to this historical artifact from Planned Parenthood’s annual reports, there are other informative gems hidden away, including…

Prenatal Services

Shockingly, at one time, prenatal care appeared to be Planned Parenthood’s “fastest growing area.”

This was how Planned Parenthood described the service in their 1996-1997 annual report:

But Planned Parenthood’s short-lived initiative to “implement a comprehensive prenatal care model” appears to have failed. The truth is that abortion has always been Planned Parenthood’s focus, which might explain why this once “fastest growing service” dropped nearly 44 percent from 2010 to 2014.

Mammograms

Live Action has documented the deceptive way that Planned Parenthood describes its breast care services, implying that the abortion business provides mammograms when it does not. Those who oppose Planned Parenthood’s defunding have even erroneously argued to Congress (and elsewhere) that the organization provides this vital health care service. When Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards appeared on The Joy Behar Show to oppose ending Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer subsidies, she claimed that “millions of women in this country are gonna lose their healthcare access–not to abortion services–to basic family planning, you know, mammograms.”

A few years ago, Live Action blew the lid off this deception, when an investigator called 30 Planned Parenthood facilities in 27 different states inquiring about mammograms, and was told by several Planned Parenthood staffers that no Planned Parenthood facility provides them:

In fact, Planned Parenthood has never provided mammograms, despite the fact that documents from 1994 and 1995 imply they do. The PPFA annual reports state the following under the heading “Reproductive and Sexual Health Treatment”:

“screening for cancers of the reproductive organs, including breast examination and instruction in breast self-exam, mammography [emphasis mine] and Pap tests, which detect cervical abnormalities…”

 

Today, Planned Parenthood spokespersons choose their words a bit more carefully and describe these same services as “breast screenings” or “breast exams.”

Soros Donations

Reflected in several Planned Parenthood annual reports is the fact that the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — both organizations which funnel huge dollars into the abortion industry — has been financially assisting Planned Parenthood for years with funding for staff training, data collection, and the expansion of abortion services.

Although more examples exist, I have displayed just one below:

Live Action News has previously reported that George Soros and family are also top donors to Planned Parenthood Votes.

Services

Planned Parenthood consistently misleads the public into believing that abortion is a small percentage of what they do. They accomplish this by adding many items (referred to as “services”) together with abortion numbers. For example, if a patient comes to Planned Parenthood for an abortion but also receives a pregnancy test, birth control, and STD testing while there for her abortion, it gives the appearance that the abortion was only a small portion of the reason for her visit. What was revealing to me as I reviewed many years of annual reports was that several types of so-called “screenings” or “tests” have only recently been added to Planned Parenthood’s services totals.

Examples include:

STI/STD screenings – These particular screenings are a very large percentage of the services Planned Parenthood reports (3,533,522 in 2014 alone); however, they were not always calculated in.

In the ten years between 1991 and 2000, there was no category in Planned Parenthood’s “services” listing for STI/STD tests. Although the organization may have mentioned them from time to time, it would appear that they did not view these screenings as an actual service — that is, until the year 2002, when 1,346,710 screenings were recorded for the previous year.

HPV treatments – The same is true for the genital warts/HPV treatments. Those services showed up in 2009 when they had not previously been reported. In addition, HPV vaccine services were shown for the first time in the 2007 report, due to the fact that the vaccine had not previously been approved.

PAP tests – These did not appear in Planned Parenthood’s services totals until 2004, and in that year, Planned Parenthood reported 1,183,692. By 2014, just ten years later, this service had plummeted by 77 percent to only 271,539.

Breast care – Between 1992 and 1998, breast exam/care services did not show up on Planned Parenthood’s “services” list. Then, in 1999, 1,122,175 were recorded for the previous year. As with many other services, these also took a nosedive of almost 68 percent by 2014.

Adoption services did not show up in Planned Parenthood’s totals until 2005. Prior to that year, those numbers were categorized as “referred out” and were not included in the overall services totals performed by Planned Parenthood. Today, despite the fact that adoption services are down nearly 59 percent since 2007 and they remain “referrals,” Planned Parenthood adds these figures to their totals.

The addition of these referrals, tests, and screenings to Planned Parenthood’s services summaries further dilutes their abortion numbers.

This gives Planned Parenthood the cover they need to masquerade as a health care provider, when in fact, as Live Action News has previously documented, Planned Parenthood is an abortion corporation:

The proof is in the numbers.

Planned Parenthood’s annual reports show that in 1991, Planned Parenthood performed 129,000 abortions and received $124 million in government grants and contracts. By 2014, abortions more than doubled, increasing two and a half times the 1991 rate to 323,999.

In that same year, Planned Parenthood received a whopping $553.7 million in tax dollars, nearly four and a half times the 1991 amount.

With all Planned Parenthood’s hype about preventing abortion, it would appear from their own reports that their system is not working.