It is beyond amazing how the nation’s largest abortion corporation Planned Parenthood will mislead the public about the services they provide, all while the media is willingly complicit in their deceptions, by spinning the facts about prenatal care and other services. The latest example can be seen in a Tennessee media outlet, which compares prenatal care to “vaginal infections.”
Lest you have the same puzzled reaction as I did, I will explain – or attempt to.
One of the more well-known examples of how Planned Parenthood has lied to the media and the public about its services is the false claim and out-right lie that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms. This myth was debunked despite the efforts of complicit media outlets, which allowed Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and other staffers and supporters to repeat the falsehood without question or a single challenge to Planned Parenthood’s alleged facts. Here is the truth, from Richards’ own lips:
Once Planned Parenthood was caught red-handed in the lie, they had to figure out a way to leverage the marketing benefits that their false claim provided them. To do this, Planned Parenthood directed media supporters to incidents where it provided a breast exam which resulted in a patient seeking a mammogram that was never offered by Planned Parenthood to begin with.
And, of course, the media continues to comply, spinning the lack of mammograms to favor Planned Parenthood.
Yet nowhere else in the media’s disillusioned minds would they consider touting report after report on a single OB/GYN or nurse practitioner’s office which saved lives by giving breast exams, without one cent of government money. Nope, only for Planned Parenthood.
Now, a media outlet in Tennessee has done a similar sleight of hand trick regarding prenatal care at Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis.
BACKGROUND:
Nationally, the abortion giant has insisted over and again that prenatal care is one of its core services that women will lose if taxpayer funding is cut off.
That is, until this false claim was debunked by a Live Action investigation:
Live Action’s undercover footage (above) was so embarrassing for Planned Parenthood that the organization had to purge the term “prenatal” from the top portion of its website.
Despite this, politicians – and yes, media promoters – still make the false claim that prenatal care is a primary service of the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Despite the media’s willful blindness and apparent inability to research, it does seem logical that an organization claiming to specialize in “women’s health care” would, at the very least, offer prenatal care. But this is not the case with Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood’s latest 2015-2016 report shows that nationally, prenatal care services dropped nearly 46 percent in a single year (from 17,419 to 9,419).
Even more damning, the 2015 numbers also reveal that prenatal care at the abortion corporation has decreased nearly 70 percent since 2010, when prenatal services numbered 31,098.
TENNESSEE:
Journalist Tonyaa Weathersbee, who writes for CommercialAppeal.com, recently published an article that included an interview with Sarah Wallett, medical director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis.
Weathersbee begins her report by stating that the Planned Parenthood abortionist was “lured” into her profession because of her “faith,” quoting Wallett as saying:
Becoming a doctor was a way of living out my faith, of taking care of people who needed me … and women were specifically who I saw as needing me.
Wallett moved to Tennessee from Kentucky. She prides herself in providing abortions, as the video below shows:
Weathersbee focused her story on an alleged OB/GYN shortage in the area. So, of course, any good journalist knows that if the topic is legitimate physician shortages, you should go running to the nation’s largest abortion corporation — not a birthing center or a hospital or another physician who actually delivers babies — for a statement… right?
In what appears to be a creative way to spin the fact that Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis doesn’t offer any prenatal care services, Weathersbee writes the following:
While Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide prenatal care, the gynecological examinations that Wallett provides have helped women detect vaginal infections, some of which can lead to premature births and miscarriages.
Despite admitting that the Memphis Planned Parenthood facilities do not provide prenatal care services, the journalist points out how important prenatal care is, adding:
For one thing, Shelby County has made significant progress in tamping down its infant mortality rate. Since 2006, that rate has dropped from 13.8 percent per 1,000 live births in 2006 to 8.2 percent in 2015.
That improvement came, in no small part, because the county pushed earlier prenatal care and emphasis on maternal health.
So, let’s recap. Prenatal care is important, Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide the service, yet this qualifies them to be interviewed for Weathersbee’s story.
Confused? So am I.
In order to help Weathersbee see how ridiculous her decision to include Planned Parenthood is, Live Action News has done a little bit of research of our own in order to investigate just what Planned Parenthood provides in the state.
PATIENTS:
If you examine the 2016 annual report for Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis, (which serves 42 counties in Tennessee), you learn that the facility saw 7,729 patients in 2016 and 7,191 in 2015. And, according to its website, it currently sees 14,561 patients in the entire state.
In contrast, Tennessee federal health centers – which are listed under the Health Resources Services Administration’s website (HRSA) and which offer a vast array of health services – saw 369,445 patients in 2015 alone.
Federal health centers under HRSA served 5,460 prenatal patients as well, while Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis served zero.
Despite Weathersbee’s spin, nationally, Planned Parenthood’s most recent prenatal services numbers are abysmal, dropping nearly 46 percent in a single year, and 70 percent since 2010, as I’ve already mentioned.
CANCER SCREENINGS:
According to the Planned Parenthood website mentioned above, Planned Parenthood offered 2,552 cancer screenings statewide.
Tennessee federal health centers under HRSA were able to provide 174,000 cervical cancer screenings.
BREAST EXAMS:
In 2016, breast exams at Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis decreased nearly 16 percent (1,060 in 2015 to 893).
This trend follows national decreases which show that according to Planned Parenthood’s most recently published report, breast exams at the abortion corporation declined nearly 12 percent in one year, from 363,803 in 2014-2015 to 321,700 in 2015.
In addition, between 2004 and 2015-2016, breast exams at Planned Parenthood declined nationally by more than 65 percent (925,763 to 321,700).
ABORTIONS:
In 2015, Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis performed 3,313 abortions (medical and surgical) out of the 9,113 induced termination of pregnancy reports made to the state, (the most recent report available). Numbers from 2016 reveal that Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis’s abortion numbers were lower, at 2,383.
CONTRACEPTIVE CARE:
Contraceptive care Planned Parenthood Tennessee vs FQHC
An analysis conducted by Planned Parenthood’s former “special affiliate,” the Guttmacher Institute, compared Federally Qualified Health Center sites (FQHC) to Planned Parenthood centers in areas that offered publicly funded contraception care for 2015. What they found doesn’t look so good.
In counties that offered publicly funded contraception care:
- Only 4 out of 95 TN counties had at least one Planned Parenthood.
- 66 counties had at least one FQHC site.
- 91 counties didn’t have a single Planned Parenthood.
In addition:
- Planned Parenthood served fewer contraception clients in one-fourth of the TN counties where they had a Planned Parenthood facility.
- Only 1.5 percent (4 out of 262) of TN’s publicly funded family planning facilities were Planned Parenthood facilities, which served just 6 percent of contraception clients. FQHC sites served 16 percent.
FACILITIES:
At the time of this report, Planned Parenthood was operating only 4 centers in Tennessee.
However, according to the Rural Health Information Hub website, there are 112 Rural Health Clinics in Tennessee and 29 Federally Qualified Health Centers which provide services at 179 sites in the state. These centers offer a vast array of primary care services for women, unlike Planned Parenthood.
The numbers show how few services Planned Parenthood provides in Tennessee compared to other federally funded health centers.
This should cause journalists like Weathersbee to take note. But instead of focusing on health centers in Tennessee that actually help residents receive vital health care services, Weathersbee, like other media supporters of the abortion corporation, fixated on Planned Parenthood.
The public deserves to know the facts. After all, they send hundreds of thousands of dollars of government grant money to Planned Parenthood of Greater Memphis each year.
And, as Live Action News has previously documented, in the past ten years, services nationally at Planned Parenthood decreased while government funds increased more than 81 percent ($305.3 million in 2005 to $554.6 million in 2015). These increased tax dollars did not result in vital health services, but instead led to Planned Parenthood’s cornering of nearly 35 percent of the U.S. abortion market in the United States. That’s more than 320,000 abortions annually – 900 per day, one every 96 seconds.
