Planned Parenthood has refused to produce records that could prove it has irreversibly harmed children without parental consent as part of its booming transgender business, possibly in collusion with the Biden administration, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey revealed this week.
Numerous transgender clinics in Missouri, including those affiliated with Planned Parenthood, have failed to comply with court orders supporting the state attorney general’s probe of the transgender industry, which began after a whistleblower uncovered serial irregularities targeting vulnerable minors.
Bailey, a Republican, invoked the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, which empowers his office to investigate any good or service that “[p]resents a risk of, or causes, substantial injury to consumers.”
However, Planned Parenthood said it couldn’t release the documents because of a U.S. law called the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer ruled Thursday that Bailey has “broad investigative powers when the consumer is in possible need of protection,” since he is “investigating possible dishonesty by [Planned Parenthood] in their medical and billing practices.”
Therefore, Stelzer ruled, Planned Parenthood of St. Louis must “produce any and all documents not protected by HIPAA.”
Despite an unbroken string of legal victories against transgender facilities (including two Planned Parenthood affiliates), only one facility has turned over documents: Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City.
“We anticipate that there’s going to be negative findings from our investigation into Planned Parenthood,” Bailey said Tuesday on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.”
“We have reason to believe that the Biden administration intervened with some of these agencies and asked them to look at HIPAA as an excuse to not have to turn over the records,” Bailey said. “What’s most troubling about it is that several of the clinics had initially agreed to turn over the records we had subpoenaed. There were other clinics involved in addition to Planned Parenthood, and then they suddenly changed course after they had communicated with agents of the federal government.”
They may have had other reasons to fear exposure, the Missouri attorney general said.
“The other clinics in the state of Missouri have a very poor history of informing parents about the dangers and the negative consequences associated with the … prescription of life-altering, powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones when there are zero FDA approvals for use of those medications in the treatment of gender dysphoria,” Bailey told Perkins.
Clinics also engaged in “denial of certain patients’ access to mental health assessments and traditional forms of mental health treatment like psychology or psychiatry,” he said.
Whistleblower Jamie Reed, who describes herself as a left-wing lesbian and political supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., revealed that other medical personnel at the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center ignored known mental and psychological illnesses to fast-track minors into the medical pipeline.
“[N]early all children who came to the center here presented with very serious mental health problems,” including autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma histories, OCD, and serious eating disorders, Reed wrote in The Free Press.
She described how doctors would pressure parents who had reservations about signing their child up for a lifetime of cross-sex hormone injections, falsely telling them that their child likely would commit suicide without “gender-affirming hormone treatment.”
Missouri legislators passed legislation called the SAFE Act to protect minors from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and gender conversion surgeries. The Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center subsequently announced that it had ceased distribution of such hormones to those of any age.
Reed’s allegations fit broadly with the Cass Review, a comprehensive review of transgender medical and social procedures undertaken over four years for the British government by Hilary Cass, a world-renowned pediatric specialist.
“The evidence that we have uncovered through our investigation into numerous clinics operating in the shadows across the state of Missouri is consistent with the evidence that came forth when the whistleblower swore out an affidavit [in February] making very specific and credible accusations about a clinic in Saint Louis,” Bailey said, adding:
There’s no medicine or science to back up these life-altering procedures, and that these clinics raced towards these procedures to achieve a social objective. There were no clinical assessments done on the front end to determine whether the children would be better suited receiving more traditional mental health services, and certainly no tracking of the negative outcomes from these dangerous [drugs].
Bailey said he based his belief that the transgender facilities stonewalled his request on the fact that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, demonstrated questionable ethics regarding abortion.
“The behavior of Planned Parenthood in the abortion context is to consistently place their desire to terminate and end human life ahead of the health and welfare of patients. And we believe that that’s going to be true in this context, the transgender context, as well,” Bailey told Perkins.
Planned Parenthood sued to prevent parents from learning the details of their teenage girl’s sexual molestation.
In 2003, 21-year-old soccer coach John Haller began abusing a 13-year-old eighth grader. After he got her pregnant at the age of 14, Haller took the middle schooler to Planned Parenthood, posing as both her stepbrother and her father to authorize an abortion.
Planned Parenthood sued all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court to deny the teen’s parents the right to view redacted medical records, which would have revealed whether the abortion business contacted authorities under applicable law. The records also would have shown whether Planned Parenthood has a history of covering up abuse.
Planned Parenthood began transitioning sharply to carrying out transgender procedures both before and after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision threatened its abortion-focused business model.
Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report, released this week, doesn’t specifically disclose how many transgender procedures the abortion franchise carried out in the past fiscal year, lumping its transgender business among 177,237 so-called other procedures.
The report reveals that 45 of Planned Parenthood’s 49 affiliates performed transgender procedures in 2022—up from 41 the previous year and 30 in the 2020-2021 fiscal year.
Richard Muniz, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, called Bailey’s investigation a “sham” that constituted an “ongoing assault on Missourians’ health care.”
Bailey, however, promised: “My team will get to the bottom of how this clandestine network of clinics has subjected children to puberty blockers and irreversible surgery, often without parental consent. There is no more important fight than to ensure Missouri is the safest state in the nation for children.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
