Planned Parenthood recently posted a status on Facebook claiming that 87% of pregnancy resource centers gave “false or misleading information” to their callers, posing as a 17-year-old pregnant girl, during a phone investigation of the centers. The vast majority of these centers informed the callers that induced abortion can lead to an increased risk of breast cancer, mental health problems, and infertility issues in the future, which Planned Parenthood avidly denounces.
The investigation concludes that pregnancy resource centers “frequently fail to provide medically accurate information…misrepresented the medical consequences of abortion… [Frighten] pregnant teenagers and women and [discourage] abortion…and is not an accepted public health practice,” because they inform women of the possible risks associated with induced abortion.
Although Planned Parenthood vehemently denies it, there is a positive correlation between induced abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer. Abortion actually can cause future fertility problems and puts subsequent children at risk of premature birth and/or low birth weight. There really is a link between abortion and mental health issues in women. The facts are there, and women deserve to know. Before a doctor can prescribe medicine to or a surgeon can perform a procedure on a patient, he or she must be fully informed of all possible risks and complications that could develop subsequent to taking the medicine or going through with the procedure. Abortion is one of the most common surgeries performed in America—why shouldn’t these standards apply to this procedure as well?
Interestingly, if we take a look at what Planned Parenthood’s idea of providing scientifically sound facts to pregnant women looks like, we’d get claims that at 6-8 weeks, an unborn baby has “no arms, no legs, no heart no head, no brain,” (which is a grossly inaccurate assessment of the well-developed unborn baby’s appearance at that age) and a baby’s heart starts beating at “about seventeen or eighteen weeks,” (when in reality it’s at three weeks). Who is really misleading and misinforming women here?
I’d like to note that pregnancy resource centers provide pregnant women with entirely free services like pregnancy tests, options counseling, material and financial support, ultrasounds, and more. Most of their money comes from generous donors who support the life-affirming mission of these centers. On the other hand, 97% of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy related services are abortions (over 330,000 annually) while less than 3% of pregnancy related services are for pre-natal care or adoption referrals. Abortion makes up about 38% of Planned Parenthood’s clinic revenue and 15% of their overall billion-dollar income. Compared to the over $300,000,000 Planned Parenthood receives in federal funds each and every year, the amount that pregnancy resource centers receive—$30,000,000 over a four-year period, according to Planned Parenthood’s source for their claims—is miniscule.
I do question why Planned Parenthood is so eager to go after these pregnancy resource centers when they have a plethora of major self-induced problems brewing in their own organization—along with lying to women about fetal development, their employees chronically covering up and abetting statutory rape and assisting pimps in running their prostitution business with underage sex slaves. Why aren’t they working to end the corruption in their corporations instead of trying to prevent pregnancy centers from truly informing women about the dire consequences of abortion?
