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Former Planned Parenthood President Explains in New Book How She Wasn’t Pro-Abortion Enough

By Jim Sedlak

Dr. Leana Wen is a former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She served in those positions for the shortest amount of time compared to all the other CEO/presidents of the organization.

The selection of Wen was announced by Planned Parenthood in September 2018; she took office in November 2018. Right after the PP announcement, STOPP ran a story in our Wednesday STOPP Report of September 26, 2018. Here are excerpts from that story:

An immediate observation is that Dr. Wen’s philosophies don’t seem to gel with Planned Parenthood’s. Dr. Wen’s primary interest is in “Patient-Centered Care.” As a patient advocate, she wrote a critically acclaimed book titled When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests. In addition, she’s given a number of TED talks. Her TED talk on transparency in medicine has been viewed over 1.8 million times.  The fact that Planned Parenthood failed to mention any of this in its announcement of her upcoming presidency should be a warning sign for her . . .

In 2016, NPR in Baltimore ran a profile piece on Dr. Wen. It said, in part: “Trained in emergency medicine, Wen, 33, says running the health department in Baltimore is the fastest-paced job she’s had. She sees herself as the city’s doctor. Each overdose death weighs on her. ‘It’s so real for me every day,’ Wen says. These drug-related deaths are preventable. ‘And when we don’t do something about it or we don’t do enough, we see the consequence of somebody dying,’ she says. ‘That is really immediate.’” If each drug overdose death in Baltimore weighed on her, can you imagine how the 880 deaths by surgical and medical abortion every day at Planned Parenthood facilities will affect her? Her only recourse will be to deny the aborted babies are human beings. But that would certainly be hard to do by a woman doctor of her intelligence . . .

We hope that when Dr, Wen realizes the true nature of the organization, she will not compromise her compassion for patients that she showed in the ER the day of the Boston marathon bombings. We hope she will stay true to her TED talk and her book. To do that, she will have to make an early exit from Planned Parenthood.

Well, Dr. Wen’s new book, Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health, is about her life history. Of course, some of it is about her brief tenure at Planned Parenthood—just six short months. In her description of those months, Wen relates how, on her first day at the helm, she did an interview on The View about her vision for Planned Parenthood. She thought she did a good job, but immediately received criticism from a PPFA board member and other executives because she failed to mention abortion in the interview. One staffer reportedly told her that, as president of Planned Parenthood, people expected her to talk about abortion.

Right after becoming president, Wen did a tour of Planned Parenthood facilities across the country, talking to local people about expanding their work into more areas of healthcare. She found the local staffs receptive. However, when she discussed the tour in the New York City headquarters of Planned Parenthood, she was criticized and told that she needed to focus on abortion or leave.

We believe that Wen then saw the truth. She realized what Planned Parenthood is really all about. It is not a healthcare organization but an organization focused on abortion and taxpayer funding. She began, after just a few months, to plan her exit. She engaged a lawyer to work out the terms of her leaving.

At this time, Wen suffered a miscarriage and it affected her “in ways I couldn’t imagine.” As she struggled with this, at least one Planned Parenthood staffer suggested she use the miscarriage as the reason why she was leaving. As her lawyer was working out terms of her departure, she got a public “news alert” on her cell phone one day that announced the Planned Parenthood board of directors had just voted her out of office.

Wen was the second medical professional to lead Planned Parenthood since 1990. The first, Pamela Maraldo, also had visions of bringing Planned Parenthood into the mainstream of healthcare. Maraldo lasted two-and-a-half years before she received a no-confidence vote from the Planned Parenthood board.

Dr. Wen’s book speaks clearly of Planned Parenthood’s sole mission to kill as many preborn babies as possible with taxpayer money. When will the rest of America acknowledge the truth?


Jim Sedlak is executive director of American Life League, founder of STOPP International, and host of a weekly talk show on the Radio Maria Network. He has been successfully fighting Planned Parenthood since 1985.