Planned Parenthood is closer than ever to losing its federal funding, with the biggest threat currently being the American Health Care Act of 2017. Under this health care law, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers would no longer be eligible to receive taxpayer funding. Naturally, Planned Parenthood has gone into major damage control, trying to convince Americans that it is actually a health care provider that only occasionally provides abortions… as opposed to what they are: America’s largest abortion corporation. And unfortunately, Planned Parenthood has plenty of allies in the media willing to promote their lies for them.
Inside Edition recently featured Planned Parenthood in a video touting the organization’s supposed “life-saving health care.” The video, you will find, is long on propaganda, and very short on facts; basically, it should serve as an ad for Planned Parenthood instead of masquerading as a piece of investigative journalism.
Slamming the AHCA for potentially defunding Planned Parenthood, Inside Edition claims that one in five women will visit a Planned Parenthood in their lifetimes. If Planned Parenthood is defunded, Inside Edition claims, this will no longer be possible. There are some major problems with this:
1. Planned Parenthood only serves a small percentage of American women.
As Kristi Burton Brown explained:
The Guttmacher Institute – Planned Parenthood’s research arm – reports that there are 61 million reproductive-age women in the U.S.
According to Planned Parenthood’s 2013-2014 Annual Report, the organization performs:
- 487,029 Breast exams/Breast care (Note that this is not mammograms.)
- 378,692 Pap testsFor 61 million women.This means that, in one year, Planned Parenthood provides breast exams to just under 0.8% of the reproductive-age women in the United States.
In addition, the “one in five” number is an exaggeration at best.
2. Defunding Planned Parenthood would not prevent the organization’s small number of women from being served.
Allies of Planned Parenthood would surely claim that without Medicaid funding, Planned Parenthood cannot afford to continue providing “life-saving” care. But do not be mistaken — Planned Parenthood is a profitable organization, and according to a former Planned Parenthood manager, the organization sees women as nothing more than another way to make money — a “profit center.” Susan Thayer, who worked at Planned Parenthood for decades, explained that the abortion chain is obsessed with making as much money as it can. Medicaid fraud is rampant, according to Thayer, and has caused problems for Planned Parenthood multiple times in facilities across the country.
And if Planned Parenthood really was a benevolent operation intent on helping women, there would be an easy option for it to retain its taxpayer funding — an option floated by President Donald Trump himself: stop committing abortions. But Planned Parenthood President and CEO Cecile Richards flatly refused, saying that abortion was “vital” to their mission. Effectively, she is arguing that she would rather continue to commit abortions and lose taxpayer funding, than keep taxpayer funding and help the millions of American women who supposedly rely on them for health care.
3. Under CEO Cecile Richards’ leadership, Planned Parenthood’s health care services have already been steadily decreasing for years.
Inside Edition does not acknowledge this; instead, it repeats the easily-debunked 3 percent abortion lie, with even Slate and the Washington Post pointing out that this claim is misleading.
How is Planned Parenthood able to claim that abortion only makes up 3 percent of its services? Easy: creative math:
To arrive at the 3 percent figure, Planned Parenthood divides the number of abortions by the number of services the facilities provide. These services, which include STI testing, pregnancy tests, pap smears, breast exams, birth control, and others, are counted equally with an abortion procedure. So even though abortion is much more profitable for Planned Parenthood, an abortion procedure is calculated as equivalent to a pregnancy test or contraception.
What else did Inside Edition’s pro-Planned Parenthood video neglect to tell viewers?
In the video, Inside Edition tells the story of two women: Danielle Campoamor, who received birth control from Planned Parenthood to help ease her endometriosis, and Ali Walensky, who found a lump in her breast and went to Planned Parenthood for a breast exam.
Interestingly, the video blurred the lines when it came to Walensky’s cancer treatment, making it appear as if Planned Parenthood is where she got her chemotherapy, but this is absolutely false — Planned Parenthood isn’t a cancer treatment center. No one gets chemotherapy, radiation, or other cancer treatment there. Walensky doesn’t make that claim, but Inside Edition uses some clever editing to make it appear that she did.
Walensky, in all likelihood, received a breast exam from Planned Parenthood and was then referred elsewhere. Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms and never has. And as for health care screenings, the number Planned Parenthood provides is minuscule: less than 2 percent of all cancer screenings, less than 2 percent of all breast exams, and less than 1 percent of Pap tests (which screen for cervical cancer).
As for Danielle Campoamor, Inside Edition does not disclose that Campoamor openly advocates for abortion. Campoamor has complained about the lack of abortion advertisements on television, and has written an inaccurate and misleading post about what women need to know about abortions, while hiding the things women won’t be told about abortion. It doesn’t make Campoamor’s story false, of course, but it does show that she is a biased individual, and is hardly representative of the average American woman.
It is shameful that a video like this could be presented as “journalism,” when in reality, it serves as nothing more than a propaganda-filled infomercial for Planned Parenthood, full of inaccurate talking points and emotional manipulation. But all of the misleading data in the world can’t conceal the truth: Planned Parenthood is an abortion corporation, not a health care organization, that does not care about women and puts profit above all else.
