By Dave Andrusko
Thanks to the valiant work of the many pro-life members of Congress, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America is coming under the kind of close scrutiny it has so successfully avoided for decades. Adding to PPFA’s discomfort is that an authentic insider has blown the whistle on what takes place behind closed doors of the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Tuesday I wrote about an opinion piece that ran in the Hill newspaper’s Congress Blog written by Abby Johnson. Johnson, the author of “unplanned Parenthood: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader’s Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line,” worked at Planned Parenthood’s Bryan, Texas, clinic for eight years, including two years as clinic director (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2011/04/abortion-insider-abortion-is-ppfa%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cprimary-money-maker%e2%80%9d/#more-777).
In fairness, the Hill gave Deborah L. Nucatola, MD, senior director of medical services for PPFA, a chance to offer her rebuttal. Right out of the box, Nucatola tells us that Johnson “perpetuates long-standing, inaccurate myths about Planned Parenthood.” The irony is, of course, that it is Nucatola’s evasive rebuttal that recycles the mythology PPFA peddles shamelessly.
It would take forever to do a point-by-point rebuttal of her rebuttal, so let me highlight a few points that NRLC has made repeatedly that Nucatola manages to avoid addressing.
#1. I will not get lost in the weeds in a back and forth about how PPFA counts “services” versus “visits.”This is important to PPFA so that it can pretend that abortion is but a tiny, tiny percent of what it does. But it doesn’t change the point we’ve made countless times—and which was confirmed by a February 2011 Factsheet from PPFA:12% are abortion clients.
In her op-ed Johnson wrote, “As a Planned Parenthood clinic manager, I was directed to double the number of abortions our clinic performed in order to drive up revenue.” Nucatola does not really contradict the assertion that there are abortion quotas at Planned Parenthood.
Morever, she does confirm that as of next year, there is a mandate that at least one clinic in every affiliate offer abortion. Furthermore, she doesn’t contradict what we have long said about abortion being a much larger part, financially, of their clinic business than their public figures would indicate.
For the most part, Nucatola does what PPFA always does–tries to change the issue, make it about poor women, non-abortion services, and those ignorant, mean, stupid pro-lifers who “just don’t get it.”
But one thing she doesn’t rebut is that PPFA is indeed the nation’s largest abortion chain, and that more than 90% of the pregnant women receiving “services” at Planned Parenthood are sold abortions.
And for all their talk about “reducing the number of abortions in America,” Nucatola never explains why it is abortions have skyrocketed at Planned Parenthood — from 165, 509 in 1968 to 332,278 in 2009 — if abortions are such a small part of their business.
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