Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Planned Parenthood, that bastion of selflessness and love, called for folks to donate to the organization to “break Mike Pence’s heart.” This, of course, is supposed to be a humorous wink-wink, nod-nod to the time actress Mila Kunis revealed she had been pranking the vice president by donating to an organization he loathes in his name.
You can have a great sense of humor and still know there’s nothing funny about Planned Parenthood. Here are seven ways Planned Parenthood breaks hearts for fun and profit.
1. The FBI Is Investigating Planned Parenthood For Trafficking Human Body Parts
Remember a few years ago a barrage of undercover videos came out showing Planned Parenthood systematically harvesting and selling human body parts they obtain during abortions? Planned Parenthood is still suffering from the effects of those videos.
First the House Oversight Committee investigated them, then the Senate Judiciary Committee launched an investigation and found “The activities of those involved in the fetal tissue transfer industry potentially implicate a number of federal laws.” Finally, both committees found enough disturbing evidence of wrongdoing they told the FBI it needed to launch its own probe.
In his recommendation, Sen. Chuck Grassley said, “The report documents the failure of the Department of Justice, across multiple administrations, to enforce the law that bans the buying and selling of human fetal tissue. It also documents substantial evidence suggesting that the specific entities involved in the recent controversy, and/or individuals employed by those entities, may have violated that law.”
You have to hand it to PP: despite these ongoing investigations and documentation of evildoing, they keep forging ahead, asking people for donations and aborting babies like there’s just nothing to see here.
2. Planned Parenthood Will Apparently Receive Taxpayer Dollars Until the End Of Time
Despite being under FBI investigation, somehow PP still receives more than $500 million in annual federal subsidies, funneled through Medicaid, which in and of itself should be a crime. One of the first things the House Oversight Committee found in its initial investigation was Planned Parenthood needs no federal funds to operate. Americans are somewhat divided on whether abortion should be legal, but clear majorities oppose taxpayer funding for it.
Luckily for Planned Parenthood, congressional Republicans are unwilling to go to the mat on this issue. They continue to preserve funding for an entity their own investigations have found commits moral and legal atrocities.
Think of where $500 million could go if not toward Planned Parenthood. It could bolster Medicaid or even go back to taxpayers so they can spend their own money on their own health care. Giving Planned Parenthood $500 million is a poor use of taxpayer dollars at best, and a crime at worst.
3. Planned Parenthood Provides Substandard Health ‘Care’
Planned Parenthood hangs its hat on providing women health care, but not only do they actually provide more abortions than they do actual health care, their facilities aren’t always up to medical standards either. That’s why many have closed over the last few years.
Abby Johnson is a former Planned Parenthood manager and the founder of an organization that helps women leave the abortion industry, And Then There Were None. She reported that “It was because of two former abortion workers that Planned Parenthood in Delaware was temporarily shut down. The women went to authorities with evidence of dirty equipment and ‘bloody drainage’ left on operating tables between women having abortions. It was disgusting.”
At the March for Life in January, I met several women who had worked at Planned Parenthood facilities and found the atmosphere to be as unprofessional as it was emotionally draining. Annette Lancaster worked for nine months in 2015 at a Planned Parenthood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and told me, “Physicians often talked badly about patients while performing procedures on them. Sometimes physicians would not use the proper amount of sedation. They would tell the patient they were providing them with certain medications, but they were out, so the patient didn’t get it.”
So much for great health care.
4. Planned Parenthood Targets Minority and Special Needs Babies for Death
Planned Parenthood likes to say they care about minorities, but little could be further from the truth. Far more African-American babies are aborted by population than are Caucasian babies, and in New York City, more African-American babies are aborted than born. In a rare, strange transparent moment, a Planned Parenthood group actually tweeted that African-American women are safer aborting their babies than birthing them. So instead of providing better maternity care to African-Americans, let’s just kill their kids? That’s Planned Parenthood’s grisly logic.
Protecting Black Life, an outreach of Life Issues Institute, found in 2012 that “Planned Parenthood targets women of color for abortion by placing 79 percent of its surgical abortion facilities within walking distance of minority neighborhoods.”
Planned Parenthood also targets babies with Down Syndrome. In March 2016, Planned Parenthood sued for the right to target babies with Down Syndrome for abortion, and won the case when federal judge Tanya Pratt struck down an Indiana law that would have prevented this.
5. Planned Parenthood Enables Sex Trafficking
Last year, several organizations reported that Planned Parenthood helped cover up sex trafficking. Live Action published developments from a 2011 investigation of Planned Parenthood’s involvement in underage sex trafficking.
“During the original investigation, eight Planned Parenthood staffers and directors at seven clinics around the country were caught on camera teaching undercover investigators posing as pimps and prostitutes how to traffic underage sex slaves through the health-care system without being caught. The follow-up investigation revealed that Planned Parenthood consistently failed to report incidents of possible sex abuse and trained directors how to spot undercover journalists rather than how to spot sex traffickers following the original investigation.”
This kind of thing makes an organization that boasts how much they care about women look like what it is: a big, fat hypocrite.
6. Planned Parenthood’s Marquee Product, Abortion, Hurts Everyone
Abortion doesn’t just hurt babies, it hurts their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other women, as well as the men involved in the process. As The Federalist recently reported, a recent study by Priscilla Coleman, Ph.D., et al., called “Women Who Suffered Emotionally from Abortion: A Qualitative Synthesis of Their Experiences,” “looked at multiple variables that affect how women adjusted to their post-abortive experiences.” It found women suffer following abortion, mentally and emotionally. “Prior to their first pregnancy resulting in an abortion, 13 percent of those surveyed reported having visited a psychiatrist, psychologist, or counselor, compared to 67.5 percent who received mental health services after their first abortion.”
The study found women increased drug use following abortions, to numb the emotional pain. “Of the women surveyed, only 6.6 percent reported using psychotropic drugs prior to their first pregnancy resulting in an abortion, compared to 51 percent who stated they used prescription drugs for mental health issues after their abortion. The results of the study demonstrate abortion’s dynamic nature, and successfully capture the kaleidoscope of emotions that women internalize after having the procedure.”
Abortion hurts men, too. Recently, while following discussion of the Pain-Capable Act, a gentleman told me he had helped his girlfriend have an abortion and, to this day, still thinks about their baby, the hurt he helped cause, and how he wishes he had made a different decision. While there’s not nearly enough research about the men involved in making decisions about abortion, often when men finally do speak out, it’s the opposite of what Planned Parenthood would have you believe.
7. Planned Parenthood Aborts Babies
Last but certainly not least, it’s hard to think of something more heartbreaking than just the simple fact that PP’s primary goal as an organization is to snuff out the life of tiny humans about to be born. Not to mention the way they do this is cruel, ghoulish, painful, and yes, heartbreaking.
Over the summer, Federalist correspondent John Daniel Davidson described the week-long event of an unusual court case wherein a group of abortion providers tried to claim they shouldn’t have to kill a fetus before dismembering it. While the case did not specifically involve Planned Parenthood, (it was Whole Woman’s Health), expert witnesses did describe second-trimester abortions, which Planned Parenthood also performs.
Davidson wrote about the expert witness testimony of Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortion doctor, who described these kinds of abortions (trigger warning):
He went on to describe a 20-week-old fetus as being about the size of the palm of an adult hand, from fingertip to wrist, ‘not counting the legs.’ A dismemberment abortion, he explained, involves reaching into a woman’s uterus with forceps and ‘grabbing whatever is there. Maybe you rip off a leg, which is about four-inches long,’ then you pull out ‘an arm, the spine. The skull is the most difficult part. Sometimes there’s a little face staring up at you.’ He understandably called it ‘an absolutely brutal procedure, in which a living human being is torn to pieces.’
There is little more ghoulish than a second-trimester abortion other than perhaps a third-trimester abortion, and PP supports both without pause or shame.