In her Merciad Op-Ed piece published on Feb. 8, Zainab Javed wrote that it seems reasonable for the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation to adopt a policy of not making funding grants to organizations that are “under investigation” for irresponsible or criminal behavior. I agree.
I also suspect that Javed is correct to infer that Komen’s recent decision not to accept future grant applications from Planned Parenthood (PP) probably had something to do with “the A-word,” abortion, that is.
Polls consistently show that more than half of Americans have a pretty big problem with abortion. Many other Americans are ambivalent. PP, on the other hand, is the largest abortion provider in the United States, responsible for 27 percent of all abortions in the country.
That’s more than 900 abortions for every day of the year. There were 329,445 in the fiscal year ending June 2010. (All numbers cited are based on PP’s own reports.)
And PP spends millions of dollars in the political arena, fighting even the most modest, common-sense abortion regulations, promoting a radical, pro-abortion agenda and supporting pro-abortion political candidates.
PP is all about abortion. Javed cites PP’s constantly repeated claim that abortion amounts to only 3 percent of its services. This figure is the result of creative accounting, to say the very least, and it shows that PP is quite desperate to conceal the fact that it is up to its ears in abortion.
In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, a full 12 percent of PP’s clients were sold an abortion. Many of the other 88 percent merely dropped by to pick up some free birth control.
When it comes to actual business income, abortion is most definitely “the elephant in the room,” to borrow Javed’s descriptive term. By conservative estimates, at least $148.6 million, or 46.4 percent, of the $320.1 million PP received in “Non-Government Health Services Revenue” was generated by killing human beings in utero.
A woman seeking pregnancy-related services from the local PP has about a 97.6 percent likelihood of being sold an abortion, a 2.1 percent chance of getting prenatal care and a infinitesimal 0.2 percent chance or being referred for an adoption.
PP obviously depends on connections with legitimate charities such as the Susan G. Komen foundation to camouflage its massive involvement with abortion. Why else would PP practically declare war on Komen last week to avoid losing a paltry $650,000 per year in grants for breast screening that involve only 16 of PP’s 820 facilities? PP’s total income exceeds $1.1 billion per year.
By the way, PP does not even provide mammograms. They merely funnel women to other health care providers who do. Komen calls this “pass through” funding and wants to avoid the inefficient practice in the future by giving grants to the people who actually provide the needed services instead of organizations like PP.
“Wherever possible, we want to grant to the provider that is actually providing the lifesaving mammogram,” says Nancy Brinker, Komen’s founder and CEO.
But why, after being in bed with PP for about seven years, did Komen decide that now was the time to make a change? The answer has to be PP’s large and rapidly expanding reputation for fraudulent, criminal, unethical and otherwise irresponsible behavior.
The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the United States House of Representatives is currently investigating PP. The Alliance Defense Fund, on Feb. 6, presented the committee with a 23-page report on PP that documents “waste, abuse and potential fraud.”
The national public affairs journal The Hill summed up the report’s findings this way: (1) from 1995 to 2009, audits of seven PP affiliates in New York, California, Washington and Texas revealed significant fraud, waste and abuse amounting to $7,867,547.15; (2) PP affiliates nationwide are involved in 12 types of potential fraud, including fraudulent billing and reimbursement by Title XIX agencies for medications and/or services provided in connection with an abortion; and (3) one in five PP affiliates in the United States are implicated in waste, abuse and potential fraud either by publicly available audits or federal lawsuits that have come against them. PP’s problems extend beyond mere financial irregularities. For instance, PP is currently facing 58 criminal charges in connection with late-term abortions at its abortion facility in Overland Park, Kansas.
Numerous video and audio recordings made during undercover investigations of PP facilities show a nationwide pattern of PP personnel disseminating medical misinformation, sympathizing with overt racism, covering up statutory rape and incest and demonstrating a willingness to cooperate with prostitution of underage girls and sex trafficking of young girls from other countries. The current congressional investigation was almost certainly prompted in part by these reports.
To see the evidence for yourself, look up “Lila Rose undercover” on YouTube or visit liveaction.org.