Just hours after Hollywood filmmaker Joss Whedon launched a foul piece of propaganda celebrating Planned Parenthood, an undercover video surfaced that reveals a much darker reality about the nation’s leading abortion business.
Though buoyed by well over $500 million in taxpayer dollars each year, Planned Parenthood offers little else in medical services beyond abortion—despite its rhetoric that would suggest otherwise.
This was made especially clear in Live Action’s video, released on Wednesday.
When Live Action called Planned Parenthood clinics asking for other services ranging from prenatal care to adoption to parenting resources, staff at seven of the clinics said to “just go online” or “just Google” those services.
In two especially chilling moments in the video, Planned Parenthood staffers tell women who are looking for an ultrasound that they don’t actually provide ultrasounds—not unless the plan is to take the baby’s life through abortion, that is.
“We don’t do any ultrasounds for prenatal care,” a staff member at a Council Bluffs, Iowa, Planned Parenthood tells a caller. “We do them when we’re doing abortions, but not for any other reason.”
The news that Planned Parenthood is, at its core, an abortion business isn’t exactly earth-shattering.
A graphic at the end of Live Action’s video shows that the corporation “performs” nearly 35 percent of all abortions in the U.S. compared with less than 2 percent of breast exams, less than 1 percent of pap smears, and less than two percent of cancer screenings.
In fact, another video Live Action released back in January caught 92 Planned Parenthood locations admitting the fact that they do not offer prenatal care, which is in direct contradiction to spurious, repeated claims by company CEO Cecile Richards.
To Planned Parenthood’s credit, staff at one of those 92 locations that doesn’t offer prenatal care did have the presence of mind to refer a client to a local pro-life pregnancy center. A blind squirrel can occasionally find a nut, after all.
Tipping the Scales for Abortion
But Wednesday’s video exposes more than initially meets the eye.
Yes, Planned Parenthood does abortions on a highly disproportionate number of its patients, and yes, you’d have a better chance of finding a three-legged ballerina than a Planned Parenthood that provides prenatal care.
But beyond that, the video shows that even while Planned Parenthood staffers send women to the internet to look for alternatives to its “services,” the abortion chain’s lobbyists are working overtime to undermine those alternatives—even if it means trampling the free speech of pro-life pregnancy centers.
In California and Hawaii, for instance, pro-abortion supermajorities have passed legislation that would force Christian nonprofit pregnancy centers—including those operated in and by local churches—to advertise taxpayer-funded abortions at the very outposts set up to offer an alternative to the deadly practice.
The California law is likely headed to the Supreme Court, while Hawaii’s legislation sits on the governor’s desk awaiting his signature.
In Illinois, the situation is even grimmer, as the state is attempting to force pro-life medical professionals not only to advertise abortions, but to actually cultivate a list of known abortion providers within a local proximity and be ready to hand the list over to a client.
Where Will Pregnant Women Hear About Alternatives?
This, of course, violates every tenet of free speech and free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment, and pro-life attorneys have argued as much in court, gaining a preliminary victory in Illinois while the state and federal courts sort out the case.
On a practical level, pro-life lawmakers and lawyers have regularly argued that the disclaimers and referrals are unnecessary because abortion business listings are so easy to find on the internet or through the Yellow Pages—which would seem to meet the on-the-ground standard of care offered by Planned Parenthood.
Questioned whether a pro-life doctor or nurse could simply direct a client to look in the Yellow Pages rather than cultivate and distribute a list of abortion businesses, Lorie Chaiten of the American Civil Liberties Union told one Illinois House committee that idea was anathema back on May 13, 2015.
“So, I would like to think that a health care professional wouldn’t just hand the Yellow Pages,” Chaiten said. “This is about the patients really just not knowing where to turn.”
If the witch hunt against alternatives to abortion really was about making sure women knew where to turn, wouldn’t we expect Planned Parenthood’s brass to come unglued in reaction to revelations that its own staff sends women to the dreaded internet—or worse yet, the Yellow Pages—for information?
Of course, that’s not what this is about at all, and we can thank Live Action for yet another arrow of truth we can add to the quiver.