On Friday, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which would have repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as ObamaCare, and would have defunded Planned Parenthood for a year, was ultimately pulled without a vote. While Planned Parenthood continues to receive federal funding for yet another day, the hysteria and misconceptions spread by America’s abortion giant are also alive and well.
Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Focus
In a 24-hour period, Planned Parenthood Action Fund tweeted and retweeted dozens of messages calling on their supporters to stand up for health care and women’s rights. Such a call is ironic, considering that Planned Parenthood is, in actuality, an abortion corporation. The 2.5 million patients it touts has been a steady decrease, as Planned Parenthood has lost nearly half a million patients over the last decade. Also decreasing have been legitimate health care services like cancer screenings, even while taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood has increased. Planned Parenthood’s abortion market share continues to increase steadily as well.
If Planned Parenthood wasn’t so focused on abortion, why do almost none of its locations provide prenatal care? And why is getting an abortion a prerequisite for getting an ultrasound, which is the literal window into the womb? What does Planned Parenthood not want women to see? Why does Planned Parenthood have only a 0.97 market share in Pap smears, a vital form of health care for women in detecting cancer?
Planned Parenthood’s Lack of Safety for Women
Planned Parenthood took to Twitter to specifically brag about their work at the Planned Parenthood St. Louis facility.
Rep. Ann Wagner’s constituents looking for breast exams, contraceptives + other services they get from @PPSLR. Can she help them?? pic.twitter.com/KnqB532rpp
— PPMO Advocates (@PPMO_Advocates) March 25, 2017
They took a playful picture, but it completely ignores how their breast exams — which are NOT mammograms, since Planned Parenthood cannot provide them and knows it, no matter what they’d like the public to believe — make up only a 1.8 percent market share. Worse, there is no mention of how the St. Louis facility had sent its 64th patient to the hospital earlier this month. So much for ‘safe’ health care, as “this particular Planned Parenthood facility has a long history of emergency ambulance transports with an average of one every six weeks since 2009.”
Planned Parenthood’s 3% Myth
President Donald Trump tweeted about the AHCA on Friday, expressing discontent in Republican House members who planned to vote against it, despite the provision defunding Planned Parenthood.
Many jumped at the chance to criticize Trump and promote Planned Parenthood, pointing to the services the public is led to believe they specialize in. Some even pointed to the myth that abortions make up only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services, which has been debunked even by the pro-abortion outlet Slate, with Rachael Larimore calling it “The Most Meaningless Abortion Statistic Ever.”
Yet Kevin Dent and Mark Pygas, both men with thousands of followers, chimed in to mislead the public by spreading Planned Parenthood’s 3% falsehood.
@realDonaldTrump The irony is that the entire Freedom is made up of old dudes who don’t know that abortions make up 3% of its operations.
— Kevin (@TheKevinDent) March 24, 2017
@realDonaldTrump And only 3% of their services are abortions. They also prevent hundreds of thousands of unintended pregnancies every year.
— Mark Pygas (@MarkPygas) March 24, 2017
Planned Parenthood’s abortions numbered 323,999 in the most recently reported year, with Planned Parenthood performing close to 35 percent of abortions in the country. As Live Action has explained in the video below, the numbers show that 1 in 8 people who become a client of Planned Parenthood’s get an abortion. To get the deceptive 3 percent, Planned Parenthood divides the 323,999 abortions by all the 9.4 million services they claim to provide, equating a pregnancy test or a single packet of birth control pills with an abortion.
Planned Parenthood’s Taxpayer Money
Another claim, which Mark Pygas made, and which is constantly parroted by Planned Parenthood, is that federal dollars are not legally allowed to go towards abortions. This is technically true, with narrow exceptions, but it’s not the whole story. When Planned Parenthood receives federal funding for their services, money is that much more easily freed up for abortions: it’s the basic economic concept of fungibility. And, if Planned Parenthood has received an increase in federal funding, why is it that their clientele drops, along with their legitimate health care services? Where is all that money going?
Perhaps that’s why we still haven’t seen Planned Parenthood’s 2015-2016 annual report yet.
Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid Fraud
Even Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid reimbursements aren’t as simple as we are led to believe, especially since there is evidence that multiple Planned Parenthood locations in multiple states were found engaging in Medicaid fraud. Meanwhile, the 13,000 Federally Qualified Health Care Centers (FQHCs), which outnumber Planned Parenthood locations 20 to 1, have not been found to engage in such fraud and abuse, and they perform legitimate health care services without the morally troubling abortion business attached.
In Missouri, where the St. Louis Planned Parenthood facility is the last facility in the state to perform abortions, there are 588 community and federally qualified health care centers. This means there are 45 of them for every one of the 13 Planned Parenthood locations.
If health care were really the issue here, it would be no problem to defund Planned Parenthood in favor of these FQHCs. Instead, for Planned Parenthood and its allies, it’s politics as usual.
