To achieve its status as America’s number one abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has told women they need access to abortion in order to truly be equal to men or achieve success in life, and it sets abortion quotas for affiliates. According to former employees, it consistently coerces women and teens into abortions. Former Planned Parenthood staff members have even shared stories about how they were reprimanded for not selling enough abortions.
One way to ensure women feel they have to choose abortion now is to tell them that the price for an abortion is only going to increase the longer they wait. Likely short on cash and possibly dependent on their parents, young women and girls often feel they have no choice except abortion.
In an undercover video filmed by Live Action, abortionist “Dr. P” pressured an undercover investigator whom he thought was a young teenager into having an abortion. “But you don’t want to wait because the sooner you do an abortion the easier it is and the quicker it is,” he said. “[I]n the state here, you can have an abortion up to maybe 22 weeks or so. But you don’t want to do that.”
When asked why, he replied, “Well because it’s a lot harder for you. It’s more expensive, a lot more difficult.”
Former Planned Parenthood facility director Abby Johnson also explained how she convinced one woman to have an abortion:
I remember that I was trying to get her out of my office. We had been talking for at least 45 minutes and that was way over my 15 minute maximum for “counseling.” I knew I must have a stack of charts waiting in my box outside.
I finally pulled out the final card to hurry this thing along. I told her, “If you don’t have the abortion today, you won’t be able to come back to us for at least a week and it will be more expensive. You don’t want that, do you?”
Reluctantly she said that she was ready to go back for the abortion. Good. My job was done. Every line was signed and every box was checked.
Lavonne Wilenken, a former Planned Parenthood worker, described how staff members she worked with sold abortions to teens:
The counselor would say to the teenager, “Well, where’s the $250,000 that it takes to raise a child in society today?” And “What are your parents going to say when they find out that you’re pregnant?” And “What is your boyfriend doing? Is he going to help you? Where is he?” and “How are you going to finish your education if you have a baby? Don’t you know you can’t go to school if you have a baby?”
Things like that, very subtle things that will push the girl over and make her decide.
She noted, “[E]ventually I started realizing that we were lying to these women. Things that we were telling them were just lies. It wasn’t going to be better for their other children. It wasn’t going to help them continue their career or their schooling. But these were the things that we were taught to tell them, so that they could go ahead and just sign the paperwork and have the procedure done.”
Former Planned Parenthood worker Myra Kincaid said she was given the job of “counseling” women who were coming in for abortions, but ran into problems when she sent ambivalent or reluctant women home without abortions.
Kincaid said she got in trouble “if [the woman she was counseling] walked out with prenatal vitamins for a patient instead of an abortion.” The management of Planned Parenthood expected Kincaid to pressure women into abortions, which Kincaid was not willing to do.
