It has been over two months since the Center for Medical Progress released several videos attempting to accuse Planned Parenthood of illegally profiting from the sale of aborted fetuses. Over 11 state-led investigations into Planned Parenthood facilities have been conducted since then, all of which have fallen flat. Polling finds that the group remains very popular.
Yet, anti-abortion activists, despite these frustrating signs, seem unfazed.
“We’re going to keep on fighting until this organization does not get taxpayer money for what they’re doing,” said Aria Grossu, Director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told Think Progress last Saturday at the Values Voters Summit discussion on Planned Parenthood. “If they want to continue doing what they’re doing they should be able to do it on their own.”
She, alongside Lila Rose, founder of pro-life group Live Action, and Chuck Donovan, President of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, led a panel called “The Landscape of a Post-Planned Parenthood Future” this weekend. Rose started her group as a teenager with the overarching goal of dismantling Planned Parenthood. Live Action has been conducting “investigations” of the health facilities since 2007 and share close ties with the Center for Medical Progress.
These three activists offered their view of a post-Planned Parenthood society: federally qualified health centers and community health clinics would be able to absorb the millions of women left without their chosen source of health care and government money would be redirected to boost those local centers.
“Planned Parenthood is drowning in money. They don’t need taxpayers,” said Donovan during the discussion. “At the very least Congress should be consistent, fund community health centers, and get on with a program that assists women without forcing them to go in to places that have gone off the rails in the pursuit of abortion.”
This assertion is a misrepresentation that anti-choice activists have repeated over and over again. Study after study has shown the potentially disastrous effects that eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood could cause.
Community health centers serve about 6 million women of childbearing age, but they don’t have enough resources to absorb all of Planned Parenthood’s patients. 21.1 million individuals per year rely on local health centers for mental health care, dental care, and other serious medical conditions. Abortions and other specialized women reproductive care are not offered as an option at any of the community health clinics Donovan, Rose, or Grossu spoke of. Millions of women would then be left without affordable reproductive care if Planned Parenthood was no longer an option.
Planned Parenthood is drowning in money. They don’t need taxpayers.
Donovan also said to look at Texas as an “example” of what could happen if funding to Planned Parenthood is cut, though ever since Texas lawmakers stripped all of Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding, crippling the family planning network in the state, local clinics have been faced with having to increase their women’s health service capacity by about 81 percent. A research group based at the University of Texas at Austin found that more than half of Texas women faced at least one barrier to getting the reproductive health services they need.
Following the panel, Grossu asserted that a pregnant women who walks in to Planned Parenthood is “174 times more likely to get an abortion” then opt to go through an adoption process.
This difficult-to-calculate claim comes under doubt when you know more about the women’s health organizations. Planned Parenthood performed 327,653 abortions in 2013, which makes up 3 percent of the total health services they provide and making them the largest health clinic that offers abortions in the United States. STI/STD testing and treatment and contraception services make up a combined 76 percent of their health services. By law, federal funds are prohibited from being used for abortion, and does cover services such as cancer screenings and birth control. In very restricted cases, Medicaid, however, does allow government money to be spent on them. According to Grossu, cancer screening, prevention programs, and prenatal services have dropped by half while abortion numbers have remained steady. Given recent state-initiated funding cutbacks from Planned Parenthood clinics, this is not a shock.
“They’re going to make money off of the abortion and then they can sell the individual organs of the babies for $60–100 per organ,” Grossu said in reference to the videos released this summer.
But their argument against Planned Parenthood seems to have lost this round. Despite many potential ramifications of shutting down the government, as well as vast support for taxpayer dollars to keep going to Planned Parenthood clinics, certain Republicans and anti-abortion activists are still leading the fight for the clinic to be taken off the budget. Even Republican House Speaker John Boehner resigned rather than deal with an angry caucus over Planned Parenthood funding.
On Tuesday investigations in Missouri Planned Parenthood clinics found no evidence of wrong doing, after reviewing more than 3,500 pages of documents and conducting multiple interviews. Planned Parenthood President, Cecile Richards, also had a hearing in front of Congress the same day and unsurprisingly dismissed the hearing as another “baseless attack on reproductive health care.” At the same time, Planned Parenthood declared Tuesday as “Pink Out Day,” with million of Americans set to rally across the country in support of the organizations reproductive health services.
Nonetheless, Rose and other anti-choice activists aren’t about to give up.
“We need to buckle down and work even harder than ever before, we can’t [know] exactly know how everything is going to play out, but we know that exposing the truth and being persistent in doing that is incredibly powerful,” she said in her closing comments at the panel.