Planned Parenthood Shifts to Ad Celebrating Decision Not to Abort as Defunding Looms

Planned Parenthood Ad

As the nation’s largest abortion business faces the redirection of its taxpayer funding to other facilities that do not perform abortions, Planned Parenthood has been running an ad in which a young woman expresses gratitude for a Planned Parenthood staff member who encouraged her to wait before having an abortion.

“The stakes have become quite clear recently, and they’re very high,” Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards tells BuzzFeed News about the new message in the ad. “The patients I talk to are terrified they’re going to lose their access to healthcare, and docs and clinicians are terrified that this Senate is going [to] block the women with the least access to health care from getting any at all.”

In the Planned Parenthood video ad, titled “A Grateful Mom Thanks Planned Parenthood for Her Son,” a young woman says:

I found out I was pregnant and it was not planned. The most pragmatic option was to get an abortion. I honestly was very conflicted. When I went in to see the actual physician I was a wreck. She took a look at me and said, “Something tells me that today is not the day. Sleep on it and then reschedule.”

I wish I knew her name so that I could thank her for the role that she played in making me a mother.

Richards says the ad is not a switch to a message about reconsidering a decision to abort, but rather “an education campaign” to highlight some of the abortion chain’s other services.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Planned Parenthood has also orchestrated women’s rights marches and interruptions of Republican lawmakers’ townhalls to defend itself against the elimination of its taxpayer funding.

“The truth is, no one really knows what will make a difference anymore,” Richards said about the ad. “But that’s why we have to do everything we can.”

Pro-life organization Live Action, however, has cast doubt on the existence of some of Planned Parenthood’s “other” non-abortion services. In its series titled, “Planned Parenthood: The Abortion Corporation,” former managers of Planned Parenthood affiliates say in interviews that most of their clinics did not offer OB/GYN services, pre-natal, and other basic healthcare services for women.

Despite the fact that Planned Parenthood has marketed its “pre-natal services,” Live Action’s undercover investigators were turned away for those services at 92 different facilities where the staff said they do not provide pre-natal care, but do specialize in abortions.

The pro-life group’s investigators also found that many Planned Parenthood staff members said the organization does not provide routine ultrasounds for pre-natal care, but does perform them before abortions.

Since the release in 2015 of undercover videos that alleged the abortion chain harvests the body parts of aborted babies and sells them for profit, Planned Parenthood has only been able to rely on progressive activist judges who have stopped at least a dozen states from redirecting its taxpayer funding to other healthcare centers that provide more comprehensive care without performing abortions.

Nationally, there are 13,000 federally qualified healthcare centers (FQHCs) – a figure that outnumbers Planned Parenthood facilities by 20 to 1.

Despite the overwhelming number of FQHCs, however, Planned Parenthood and its political and media allies have been advancing the narrative that by redirecting funding away from Planned Parenthood, the states have interfered with low-income individuals’ ability to access federal assistance quickly.

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidential election last November, Planned Parenthood would have been celebrating an expansion of their abortion services, since Clinton vowed to end the Hyde Amendment and enact taxpayer funding of abortion for low-income women. Now, the chain is hoping to win over votes with an ad that celebrates a Planned Parenthood doctor telling a patient to wait before deciding to have an abortion.

A Marist poll released earlier this year found 61 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, including 40 percent of those who say they are “pro-choice,” and 41 percent of Democrats.

Currently, Planned Parenthood receives over a half billion dollars annually in taxpayer funding and performs more than 323,000 abortions per year.

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