Things Planned Parenthood's 'Truth Team' Forgot to Mention

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) has dispatched a "Truth Team" to rally opposition to the Pence Amendment (H.R. 1, sec. 4013), a measure to stop federal funding of PPFA and its 102 affiliates. But not everything said by PPFA officials and sympathetic media has been the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

In the interest of an informed debate about taxpayer funding of PPFA, a few omissions and potentially misleading statements are addressed below.

Claim: "This is about women's health more than abortion" (Cecile Richards, PPFA President)

This was quoted by Jonathan Alter in a March 14 opinion piece posted on Bloomberg Opinion. But Congress already spends billions every year for women's health care, through Medicaid, Medicare and other programs. Defunding PPFA is about no longer coercing taxpayers to contribute to the nation's largest abortion chain.

In its last reported fiscal year (2008-2009), PPFA clinics aborted 332,278 children, a number equal to the entire population of Cincinnati. Since 1970, PPFA has aborted an estimated 5,300,000 children, equivalent to the entire population of Colorado.

In an interview published March 17 in the Texas Tribune, Ms. Richards spoke at length about all the healthcare PPFA provides: "We see 3 million patients each year across the country. For 97 percent of them, we provide preventive care. Three percent are abortions."

Yet according to PPFA's own March 2011 Planned Parenthood Services fact sheet, 332,278 abortions were performed on some of PPFA's three million clients in the year ending June 30, 2009. This suggests that eleven percent of their clients had abortions in that year, not three percent. But the best measure of how important abortions are to PPFA's bottom line is the fact that abortions produce at least 37 percent of PPFA revenues "by very conservative estimates."[1]