Years ago, I kept tripping across documents on pro-life sites that indicated a lot of failed health inspections and malpractice suits at Planned Parenthood (PP). We collected a lot of those documents, including ones on women’s deaths, to use on a site called Problems at Planned Parenthood, sponsored by the Problems at Planned Parenthood Committee.
We felt a need for a website with a target audience of organizations that refer people to Planned Parenthood. This expanded to donors, journalists, legislators, and researchers – anyone who might be turned off by pro-life rhetoric but would appreciate a facts-only approach. The website organizes the documentation for each individual PP location, since that’s most relevant to referrers.
The problems then expanded, too. Regarding medical issues, we came across a couple of websites that featured dispatch recordings for 911 calls. On non-medical problems, we collected documents and mainstream news stories and book excerpts on: sexual abuse, racism, employee rights, financial ethics, and patient privacy.
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Then we also collected thousands of Google, Yelp, and Indeed (employee) reviews, along with some from a medical patient platform called DocASAP. We’re currently working on a new site, Glass Door, which offers employee reviews.
Employee rights was a topic where we got more information from non-prolife sources. Union-busting is the kind of topic that not all pro-lifers might notice, but left-leaning publications certainly do. And those who refer may find that a good reason to stop. As far as I’m concerned, any honest reason to not refer is good enough – and mistreating workers is actually quite a good one.
There have been several times when I thought we were close to being finished with the main body – just needing constant updates as new things happened. But then I’d come across another extensive set of problems.
This happened this summer when I found a law service, Trellis, where I could put “Planned Parenthood” in the search and find a huge number of lawsuits where PP was the defendant.
Between the ones where Trellis had the documents and those where they gave case numbers so we could get the documents from court clerks, we’ve added over a hundred new cases. They’re mainly malpractice suits and labor complaints, with a handful on large data breaches and financial improprieties.
Now we went from having some malpractice suits, mainly but not all on abortion, to having 75+ cases. The page of lists now puts them in categories, since there are so many.
And the majority don’t have to do with abortion. We find them failing to diagnose several ectopic pregnancies, then also fibroids, polyps, actual age of pregnancy, and cervical cancer.
There are complications from IUDs, implants, a vasectomy, Depo-Provera, and even diagnostic tests. Uterine and bowel perforations were usually but not always due to abortions. There was one case where they left toxins out in the vicinity of a toddler.
Why?
Why are there so many problems that involve callousness and insensitivity? Reasons that come to my mind:
- Participating in the killing of human beings and the deception of their mothers and families that frequently accompanies that lends itself to other forms of not being mindful of morality. This is the kind of explanation that hops to the mind of many pro-life activists.
- It’s a large corporation with an intense interest in making money and influencing public policy for its financial and ideological benefit. We notice similar cold-heartedness in many industries, especially among military contractors, polluting companies, and nuclear weapons manufacturers. This is often the first explanation that comes to mind with labor problems, and is generally put forth by leftist publications that decry the union-busting and the employee mistreatment upon which the desire for a union is based.
- Planned Parenthood attracts the kind of people who want there to be fewer people in the world (in some cases, fewer Brown and Black people) based on the belief that “overpopulation” is a problem. If that’s a major goal, then care in patient outcomes isn’t so important as long as the outcome means no baby.
- People who engage in killing are traumatized by those acts of killing. I’ve done a lot of work in the psychology of Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress. Symptoms include emotional numbing and outbursts of rage, and evidence for both of those are found in these documents.
Why is This Important?
Two big reasons.
One is the original motivation for the website: people who refer or donate to Planned Parenthood are already generally immune to pro-life arguments, but they may pay attention to issues that they also regard as problems.
Therefore, a facts-only approach offering documentation coming from official channels is going to be more persuasive. It won’t matter to solid PP supporters, but for those who just thought that PP had a fine reputation and so was one of several places they refer to, and they can easily decide otherwise and take it off the list, it can be effective. People who donate to a list of organizations can decide to prioritize their money elsewhere.
The other reason is to shore up the psychology of the “Great Switch.” When abortion came on as a juggernaut industry and Planned Parenthood was growing, people had a conundrum. This contradicted the idea that we’re a noble and virtuous people. Since people in general aren’t willing to give that up, they conclude that increasing abortion must fit with that, and so they buy the pro-abortion arguments.
But now the switch: abortions are banned in many states, and Planned Parenthood is shrinking. That shrinking, when defined by the number of medical centers they run, has actually been going on since the 1990s.
But it’s picked up the pace, and bids fair to do so more as the one-year federal defunding kicks in. At least, they’ve said so. The 200 centers they cite as possibly closing, which would be over a third of their total, I suspect to be an exaggeration to get supporters riled up. But there are still likely to be many.
There’s a running tab of centers closed or closing soon starting in 2020 on CLN’s project website on Grassroots Defunding:
Temporarily & Permanently Closed PP Centers – Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood
So first we need to document how PP is shrinking, which that one page does, and then we’ll find people more receptive to hearing the reasons why. After all, the behavior no longer contradicts the idea that we’re a noble and virtuous people. In fact, if worded right, it reinforces that we are.
So the idea that the reason PP is falling apart is a natural consequence of its many problems bolsters the case that PP should fall apart.
That will make the decline happen a little more quickly. And it will make that decline more solid and permanent. In the long run, we want people to be happy to see it go.
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack as guest post from Rachel McNair. You can read more of her articles here.
