Planned Parenthood President Acknowledges The Truth: Abortion Is Indeed Their Core Mission
On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood President Dr. Leana Wen finally admitted what Planned Parenthood has seemingly tried for years to deny: the main mission of the organization is to perform abortions.
Wen issued a series of tweets in response to a Buzzfeed article about her that ran on Monday titled, “Planned Parenthood’s New President Wants To Focus On Nonabortion Health Care.” Not wanting women who champion abortion to believe that somehow she didn’t regard their wishes as primary for her organization, Wen tweeted, “I am always happy to do interviews, but these headlines completely misconstrue my vision for Planned Parenthood,” followed by tweeting, “First, our core mission is providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion and reproductive health care. We will never back down from that fight - it’s a fundamental human right and women’s lives are at stake.”
Under prior Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, who served as the group’s president for 12 years, the group consistently tried to portray itself primarily as a health care provider, ignoring the massive abortion machine it truly is. The organization’s website totally ignores the term "abortion" in its section titled, “Who We Are,” writing, “Today, Planned Parenthood is a trusted health care provider, an informed educator, a passionate advocate, and a global partner helping similar organizations around the world. Planned Parenthood delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of women, men, and young people worldwide.” In fact, the website’s home page never mentions the word abortion, only referring to “reproductive health care.”
As Rich Lowry, taking on the Planned Parenthood claim that abortion represented only 3% of its services, wrote in the New York Post in 2015:
The 3 percent factoid is crafted to obscure the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business. The group performs about 330,000 abortions a year, or roughly 30 percent of all the abortions in the country. By its own accounting in its 2013-2014 annual report, it provides about as many abortions as Pap tests (380,000). The group does more breast exams and provides more breast-care services (490,000), but not by that much. The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services … By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.
The Washington Post echoed that Planned Parenthood’s claim was inaccurate, stating, “The 3 percent figure that Planned Parenthood uses is misleading, comparing abortion services to every other service that it provides. The organization treats each service — pregnancy test, STD test, abortion, birth control — equally. Yet there are obvious difference between a surgical (or even medical) abortion, and offering a urine (or even blood) pregnancy test. These services are not all comparable in how much they cost or how extensive the service or procedure is.”
