The lawsuit filed by Sue Thayer, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director, against Planned Parenthood of the Heartland will move forward, Alliance Defending Freedom announced yesterday.
Thayer began working at her local Planned Parenthood in Iowa in 1991 as an office assistant, but was quickly promoted to office manager. The facility she worked at did not perform abortions, and Thayer was motivated by a desire to help and serve women. But she quickly realized that all was not right at her Planned Parenthood. When they began offering webcam abortions, and urged her to facilitate the webcam abortions, she realized that she needed to do something. She called her local Right to Life office, who put her in touch with Alliance Defending Freedom. Thayer became a whistleblower, exposing millions of dollars in fraud and abuse. In 2011, a lawsuit was filed on her behalf.
According to Thayer, Planned Parenthood sees women’s bodies as nothing more than a profit center. Women were given birth control pills without being seen by a doctor first. Women were pressured to choose abortions right away, and webcam abortions especially, which Thayer testified were huge money-makers for Planned Parenthood.
After taking the abortion pills, Planned Parenthood staffers would instruct women to go to their local ER if things went wrong and claim they had a miscarriage, rather than tell the emergency room doctors about the abortion. Women were never told that abortion pill reversal was an option if they began to regret their abortions (information can be found here). Chillingly, when an infant was found dead at the town’s recycling center, Planned Parenthood refused to cooperate with local police, and instead went to the media, turning the baby’s death into a fundraising opportunity.
But it was the Medicaid fraud and abuse that were the major issues, which Live Action News covered in a a four part series. The fraudulent practices included purchasing birth control pills for $3, selling them for $35, and then receiving a $26 reimbursement. They would also bill Medicaid for more birth control than was medically necessary through a program called “C-Mail”, and when packages were returned, they would re-bill Medicaid. They also improperly solicited donations from Medicaid-eligible women. Thayer, who worked for Planned Parenthood for 17 years, alleges that the multiple instances of fraud, abuse, and waste add up to $28 million.
Planned Parenthood had filed a motion to dismiss the case, but their motion was dismissed, meaning that the case will move forward. Senior Counsel Steven Aden released the following statement:
Planned Parenthood views women as profit centers, not patients. Taxpayers deserve to know that Planned Parenthood is acting illegally, not only by wrongfully submitting claims to Medicaid for reimbursement, but also by failing to protect the health of the women it purports to serve. Our tax dollars should fund the thousands of trusted, local public health clinics across America, not the barbaric acts of this billion-dollar corporation.
This is not the first time Planned Parenthood has been caught defrauding Medicaid. Indeed, Planned Parenthood routinely breaks the law. Planned Parenthood’s motion to dismiss Thayer’s lawsuit was an attempt to keep the truth hidden, but they failed. Instead, the lawsuit will move forward, and we can only expect to find out even more horrifying details of the abuses that go on behind closed doors at America’s largest abortion mill.
