THE WEDNESDAY STOPP REPORT

Planned Parenthood releases new strategy memo

This past week, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, sent a memo to the supporters of Planned Parenthood outlining a "new" strategy for Planned Parenthood. According to Richards, the memo, "A Strategy for Moving Forward," was generated as a result of her evaluation of the situation at Planned Parenthood after nine months as its president.

Richards says that the strategy was developed to answer the question, "What do we have to do differently to achieve our goals more quickly and more effectively?"

We will devote this week's WSR to an analysis of A Strategy for Moving Forward. If you would like to read the entire Planned Parenthood document, you can find it at, http://www.ppaction.org/ppaction/strategy_memo1.html.

What Planned Parenthood reveals in its new strategy

The thing that hits you about A Strategy for Moving Forward is that Richards believes that pro-life forces have been very effective in our battle against Planned Parenthood. She says that Planned Parenthood is on the "defensive." Her view is that Planned Parenthood is spending a great deal of time and energy defending itself against us, the pro-life movement.

Richards specifically mentions Judie Brown (our leader here at American Life League) and Joe Scheidler (our good friend at the Pro-Life Action League) as two of Planned Parenthood's enemies.

The entire tone of this document reveals a Planned Parenthood leader who feels the organization is under siege. She continually talks about Planned Parenthood needing to take the lead in explaining the things it is for, rather than defending what it does.

The interesting thing is that all the items she wants to trumpet as things Planned Parenthood is proud of are basically lies. Lies about how its contraceptive business prevents abortion. Lies about its abortion business - in the document Richards lists many of the major "services" provided by Planned Parenthood, but never mentions that it commits 20% of all abortions in the United States (255,015 last year).

To start our analysis of the document, let's look at some of the lies Richards wants Planned Parenthood supporters to spread.

Lies in the Planned Parenthood strategy

There are a great many lies in the document. Here are just a few. After each lie, we give you some information on the truth that exposes the lie …

Richards' lie: Planned Parenthood is the "most trusted" provider of women's health services in the country.

The truth: A number of Planned Parenthood's customers have died after receiving its services. Numerous medical malpractice lawsuits have been filed by women who have been injured at Planned Parenthood clinics.

An undercover investigation by Life Dynamics Incorporated revealed that many Planned Parenthood facilities gave young girls information so they could cover up statutory rape. Planned Parenthood in San Francisco posted a letter on its web site from a minor girl who thanked Planned Parenthood for hiding her rape from her parents. Attorneys general in two states are investigating these charges against Planned Parenthood and seeking patient records to prove what is happening. Planned Parenthood is refusing to turn over the records.

Consumer Reports listed two of Planned Parenthood's condoms dead last in its ratings of condoms. One was identified as unacceptable.

Clearly, Planned Parenthood is not an organization to be trusted.

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Richards' lie: It's estimated that contraceptive services provided by Planned Parenthood affiliate health centers prevent 617,000 unintended pregnancies each year.

The truth: These figures are calculated using the effectiveness of birth control methods with the assumption that sex activities stay the same whether or not birth control is used, yet we know that Planned Parenthood education activities introduce many teens to sex and market its birth control products.

An analysis of a study done by Planned Parenthood itself in the 1980s showed that teens who went through what Planned Parenthood considered "comprehensive sex education" were more than 50% more likely to be sexually active (from 30% to 46%). These teens were almost twice as likely to engage in "safe sex" (use birth control).

Thus, Planned Parenthood's programs increase sexual activity, which increases the potential for unintended pregnancies. Then Planned Parenthood has the chutzpa to use these increased incidents of teen sexual activity to claim its birth control prevents unintended pregnancies.

Clearly, if we stopped Planned Parenthood from spreading its sexual doctrine, fewer children would be having sex. Planned Parenthood's calculations are totally bogus.

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Richards' lie: Between 1990 and 2000, 75% of the decline in teenage pregnancy was due to improved contraceptive use.

The truth: It is true that teen pregnancies have gone down. The teen pregnancy rate in 1972 was 9.5% and in 1980 it was 11.1% and it rose to 11.7% in 1990. Then it fell to 8.4% in 2000 and continued its downward trend in 2002 (the last year for which data is available) when it hit 7.5%.

So what happened in the 1990s to reverse the trend? Planned Parenthood would like you to believe it was its products, but the fact is that the only change made in the 90s was the introduction of chastity and abstinence messages to our children. These coordinated messages began in the early 90s and proved so effective that the government started funding them and the programs grew and teen pregnancy continued to decline. There are two sets of facts that make a lie of Planned Parenthood's claim:

1. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of teenagers using contraceptives fell from 32.8% in 1988 to 29.8% in 1995 and then rose slightly to 31.5% in 2002. Clearly there was no "improved contraceptive use."
2. During the decade, according to Planned Parenthood's own annual reports, attendance at its sex education programs fell from 1.8 million in 1990 to 1.2 million in 2000.

Yet teen pregnancies went down. It is not Planned Parenthood's programs or products that have caused the drop in teen pregnancy; it is the moral message of chastity that has saved our children from the ravages of a sexually active lifestyle.

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Richards' lie: Access to birth control is a good way to prevent the need for abortions.

The truth: Planned Parenthood has known for years that most medical and surgical abortions are obtained by women who use birth control.

The Guttmacher Institute states on its web site that 54% of women having abortions used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.

This, of course, does not even take into account the fact that almost all the so-called contraceptives sold by Planned Parenthood prevent implantation as one of their mechanisms and, therefore, cause chemical abortions.

Planned Parenthood strategy specifics

In the memo, Richards lists five specific parts of the strategy. They are:

1. We have to make it clear what we are for, not just what we are against.
2. We have to play offense, not defense.
3. We have to speak common sense to folks in the heartland of our country.
4. We need a new, better deal between the pro-choice movement and legislators and policymakers.
5. We have to use the courts not only to protect our rights, but also to get our ideas across.

Items 1, 2 and 3 basically implore Planned Parenthood people to spread the lies we enumerated in the previous section: that Planned Parenthood is the answer to the nation's sexual woes. Of course the truth is that Planned Parenthood is not the answer, it is the problem.

In addition, item 1 specifically calls for the passage of the Prevention First Act. This act, which is being pushed by Planned Parenthood at both the federal and state level, would expand access to birth control through government programs, force insurance companies to pay for birth control, and use government funds to promote emergency contraception - which everyone agrees works some of the time by preventing implantation and, therefore, kills a newly created human being.

Item 1 also calls for increasing sex education in schools, noting that "fewer than half of the public schools in the United States now offer information on how to obtain birth control."

In item 2, Richards expresses the need to defend contraception. It notes that there is a "war on contraception" emerging across the United States and Planned Parenthood needs to address this.

In item 3, Richards expounds on the need for Planned Parenthood to be politically active in all states across the nation and then specifically calls for an expansion of Medicaid to cover birth control products. Her strategy says that, in the states in the heartland of the country, Planned Parenthood should emphasize that it prevents unintended pregnancies.

In item 4, Richards essentially says that elected officials who say they are "pro-choice" and support the Planned Parenthood agenda will be expected to deliver. She gives the 40-month battle of getting approval for over-the-counter sales of so-called emergency contraception as an example of what is expected. She praised members of Congress who "never flinched, never tired of working with us, and never yielded until we achieved our goal."

In item 5, Richards correctly observes, "Throughout our 90-year history, litigation has always been one of Planned Parenthood's most powerful tools for defending women's rights and overcoming efforts to constrain our freedom. It's still true today." Ironically, in her discussion of this item, she cites the 10-year struggle over the partial birth abortion laws and how Planned Parenthood opponents have done exactly what she described in item #4 as what Planned Parenthood needs to do. Richards then observes that the way for Planned Parenthood to prevail is to use the courts to get its way. Of course, what Richards refers to as "defending women's rights" is really defending the killing of babies in the womb and hurting women through abortion.

Those familiar with Planned Parenthood will note that there is nothing really new in this strategy. Everything Richards is calling for is exactly what Planned Parenthood has been trying to accomplish for years.

What is new in the document is the implicit admission that Planned Parenthood is having a harder and harder time achieving its goals and that it really feels it is on the defensive. This should be an encouragement to all who daily fight this insidious organization.

Countering Planned Parenthood's "new" strategy

Our view of this message of strategy from Cecile Richards is that she has discovered, after nine months on the job, that we (the pro-life movement) have made things difficult for Planned Parenthood-that the efforts we have been putting forth through our plan to defeat Planned Parenthood, and other initiatives are having their desired effect.

There was no startling new news in this strategy document. However, the document does give us useful information on where Planned Parenthood is trying to take the battle and how we can refine our strategy to better thwart its planned activities.

In next week's WSR, we will bring you a full description of how our efforts can be fine-tuned to keep Planned Parenthood on the defense.

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