1997-98 Planned Parenthood Annual Report Released
New Rhetoric, Same Old Sad Story at Nation's Top Abortion Chain
By Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D., NRL Director of Education and Research
While the theme of Planned Parenthood's latest annual report is "Responsible Choices," the underlying message is still the same: abortion on demand, with the nation's largest abortion provider and promoter brokering the deal. Since the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is an enormously influential player in the abortion battle, this story will compare the rosy rhetoric of the annual report with the grisly reality.
Performing More and More Abortions
Rhetoric: Planned Parenthood's new "Responsible Choices" action agenda "speaks to America's moral center - - our shared faith in equality, respect for diversity, compassion for the vulnerable."
Reality: While the number of abortions declined nationally, Planned Parenthood performed more abortions in 1997 than it has in any year since its founding.
The number of abortions performed in the U.S. remained relatively stable from 1996 to 1997 at about 1.36 million. Yet the number of abortions performed at Planned Parenthood clinics rose for the third straight year, to an all-time high of 165,174. This figure represents nearly one out of every eight abortions performed in the U.S.
Planned Parenthood referred an additional 47,550 women to other facilities for abortions, making it complicit in the deaths of over 200,000 unborn children in 1997. Planned Parenthood never explains how this is compatible with its newfound "compassion for the vulnerable."
As a contrast, the same "Services" chart shows Planned Parenthood serving only 17,246 prenatal patients during the same period. Over four times (80,115) as many prenatal patients were referred elsewhere. Absent referrals, the ratio of abortion clients to prenatal clients is nearly 10 to 1, proving again that Planned Parenthood's plans typically don't involve parenthood.
A conservative estimate is that the cost for a standard first trimester suction abortion (1) is $296. For purposes of calculation, let's assume that all Planned Parenthood abortions were limited to the first 13 weeks (though we know that there are Planned Parenthood clinics which do later, more expensive abortions). Under those circumstances abortion would account for at least $48.9 million in revenue for Planned Parenthood, or nearly a quarter of its entire clinical operations income of $206.5 million.
In 1997-98, the amount of money Planned Parenthood received from government grants and contracts declined by $10 million from the previous year, yet this small decline still meant that government monies accounted for nearly 30% of PPFA's overall budget. Despite the receipt of $165 million in taxpayer dollars, Planned Parenthood complains that government programs supporting "family planning services for low income women remain chronically underfunded."
Finding New Ways to Kill the Unborn
Rhetoric: Planned Parenthood says its national office is "recognized worldwide as an authority on all aspects of reproductive healthcare." The photo accompanying the "Medical Services" section shows a doctor giving a mother an ultrasound of her unborn baby, while the article says, "We monitor reproductive technology; instigate groundbreaking research...."
Reality: Planned Parenthood offers prenatal care to relatively few patients. Very little of the research featured in the report involves any aspect of prenatal or fetal care, though considerable space is allocated to the development of new abortion methods.
The one project the report mentions involving prenatal care is one which ended in 1997. Back in 1995, Planned Parenthood received a $1.4 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trust to develop a Comprehensive Prenatal Care Network aiming to "reduce the rates of infant and maternal death as well as the premature birth of low-birth-weight babies."
During the three years the program ran, only 17 of Planned Parenthood's 133 affiliates participated (though six additional affiliates exploring the initiation of comprehensive prenatal services received "technical assistance"), with just 43,610 women receiving prenatal care. By comparison, 73 of Planned Parenthood's affiliates offered abortion, performing 458,440 abortions during the same timeframe. The report does not mention any medical advances or innovations that came out of the three-year prenatal study.
Planned Parenthood also trumpets its just-completed study of the chemical abortifacient, methotrexate, at 27 of its affiliates, involving 1,900 women. Used in combination with a prostaglandin that stimulates contractions, this powerful anti-cancer drug induces abortion in women up to about the middle of the first trimester; the report does not specify the cut-off date used in the study.
Though not a patent holder or manufacturer of the drug, Planned Parenthood undertook the study in an effort to try to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to change the labeling on the drug so that doctors could prescribe it for abortion without fear of legal liability. Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood said that preliminary results show the method to be "safe and highly effective."(2)
New methods of abortion, including chemical and "early surgical abortions," were featured in the newly updated version of the PPFA Manual of Medical Standards. Planned Parenthood's report says that 38 out of the 73 affiliates offering abortion now offer "manual vacuum aspiration," a technique developed by Jerry Edwards, the medical director of Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas.
Using ultrasound, the abortionist inserts and aims a flexible curette attached to a vacuum syringe at the newly implanted embryo. The embryo is torn from the uterine wall by the suction of the syringe. The report proudly states that the Houston affiliate's "physician training video has enabled many other providers to offer abortion before six weeks gestation."
Fighting Pro-Life Policy
Rhetoric: "... [P]eople are better able to make responsible choices for themselves when informed about their bodies, their health, and their world."
Reality: Planned Parenthood blocked an informed consent/right to know law in Florida and has sought to block similar laws in Montana, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
One of the four stated goals of Planned Parenthood's "Responsible Choices" action agenda is to "ensure access to abortion," and the report details numerous examples of Planned Parenthood's aggressive political and legal advocacy.
The report says, "Our energetic advocacy efforts throughout the previous year proved crucial, in September 1998, to sustaining President Clinton's veto of the so called 'Partial-Birth' Abortion Ban Act." Calling mandatory parental involvement laws "devastating," Planned Parenthood says "we continued our fight against the. . . Child Custody Protection Act."
Planned Parenthood is fighting against the Child Custody Protection Act in more ways than one. At "teenwire," Planned Parenthood's new web site aimed at teens (www.teenwire.com), pregnant teens are told that they should tell their parents "if you can" and warned that many states have parental consent or notification laws.
The advice doesn't end there, however. "If you don't feel that you can tell your parents," the site informs teens, "a judge may be able to give you permission anyway." A separate page lists the requirements of each state and the conditions of a judicial bypass.
Ever helpful, the site tells teens, "The counselors at the clinic in your area will be able to explain the laws in your state or region of the country and help you make arrangements."
Teenwire informs web surfers that some teens travel to neighboring states to have their abortions where, one supposes, the requirements are easier or non-existent.
Planned Parenthood was active in challenging various other pro-life measures in the states. Saying that it had "blocked bans on abortion methods," the report says that Planned Parenthood Legal Defense Fund had helped win permanent injunctions against partial-birth abortion bans in Arizona and Montana and temporary injunctions against similar laws in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Virginia. (The injunction against the Virginia law was later removed.)
Speaking of its public policy efforts, Planned Parenthood complained of the "distortion" and "sensationalism" of "religious political extremists," never mentioning the role it and other pro-abortion organizations played in perpetuating misinformation about the truly extreme partial-birth abortion procedure.
Going Global
Rhetoric: "We are especially committed to representing the voices of the most vulnerable in society - - the young, the poor, and the disenfranchised, who are always the first targets of political attack."
Reality: Planned Parenthood leads the political attack on world's youngest, poorest, most vulnerable members, proudly claiming to have "broadened access to safe abortion services" through its international assistance program.
While Planned Parenthood has always had an international presence through its association with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the annual report claims that "the recent political backlash against federal funding for international family planning has reinvigorated our commitment to our global mission."
In reality, most of the controversy in Congress over funding of the so-called "population assistance" program has related directly to the Clinton-Gore Administration's policy of directing much of this money to IPPF and other organizations that aggressively promote the legalization and expansion of abortion "services" as a method of population control. Indeed, PPFA and its allies have actually blocked legislative proposals to substantially expand funding for overseas birth-control programs, simply because those proposals were coupled with restrictions on aid to abortion-promoting groups.
Through its Family Planning International Assistance (FPIA) program, Planned Parenthood "provides supplies and technical assistance to family planning projects in the developing world." Two international projects show what these "family planning projects" sometimes involve. In Guyana, the report notes, FPIA "provides safe abortion services to low income women." In Peru, "a similar new initiative expands access to safe abortion."
A new program, termed Planned Parenthood's Global Partnership Program, links U.S. Planned Parenthood affiliates with "family planning and advocacy groups around the globe." Planned Parenthood claims, "[E]ach of these partnerships transforms first hand experience into hard hitting mobilization and builds a national constituency for international reproductive health by integrating public education and grassroots organizing." What this ultimately means is unclear. Russian "family planning providers" were paired with the Des Moines Planned Parenthood affiliate (which offers abortions) and, according to the report, are modeling their clinics after those in Iowa. Recently, they have begun informally referring to their clinics as "PPs."
Planned Parenthood: Paragon of Virtue?
On the opening page of the report, Planned Parenthood quotes a letter from "A.G." in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, who writes, "The name, Planned Parenthood, to me, is a synonym for goodness."
Later on, reemphasizing the theme, "Responsible Choices," the report features names and pictures of various Hollywood celebrities who came to Washington, D.C., "to voice their strong support for the right of every individual to make responsible sexual and reproductive choices" and help Planned Parenthood "commemorate" the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision which has led to the death of more than 38 million unborn Americans since 1973.
A great many of those children perished in Planned Parenthood clinics. Is this what Planned Parenthood offers as a "responsible choice"? Many more will die as a result of Planned Parenthood's "research" and political advocacy. Is this what "goodness" means?
(1) Los Angeles Times, 1/24/95.
(2) Perhaps this rosy assessment should be taken with a grain of salt. Back in 1995, during nationwide trials of the French abortion pill, RU 486, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa told the press that there had been no complications among the women participating in the trial at Planned Parenthood's Des Moines clinic. Later reports indicated that at least one woman who had taken the abortion pill at the Des Moines clinic nearly bled to death.