This page contains frequently asked questions about Live Action’s “Abortion Corporation” investigation. If you would like addition information on this topic, please contact us.
Q: Aren't all of Live Action's videos heavily edited or manipulated?
A: No. While Live Action edits its videos like any news organization to distill down the important points of sometimes hundreds of hours of raw footage, we are careful to keep things in context. We also often include additional information from third party sources on our website to back up our research. Such sources include the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Census Bureau, and even Planned Parenthood itself.
At the end of each investigative video in the Abortion Corporation series, Live Action also shows how many centers we contacted and gives credit to the Planned Parenthood centers that said they offered the health services claimed. Additionally, in the news releases for each investigative video, we provide the news media with lists of the centers we contacted so that any skeptical reporter or curious individual can call the Planned Parenthood facilities we investigated and ask for themselves. These news releases are found in the Media section of our website. We encourage anyone to call Planned Parenthood centers and ask if they offer prenatal care, adoption support, mammograms, or ultrasounds to check on the health of a baby for a mother carrying her to term. Ask how long they’ve been offering the service and then ask for proof of it.
Planned Parenthood’s claims of Live Action having “heavily edited” or “manipulated” videos is merely a smoke-screen to cover up for their own deceit. In 2017, Live Action released an investigative report – including public records and testimony from former Planned Parenthood employees – showing that Planned Parenthood lied to the media and to the American people when it claimed in 2011 to have reported child sex trafficking in its facilities and when it claimed it would retrain thousands of employees to identify and report sex trafficking. You can read a news story about the cover-up here.
Q: If Planned Parenthood is defunded, where will low-income people and others get health care, birth control, and STI testing and treatment?
A: There are thousands of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in the U.S. that provide comprehensive health care for low-income men, women, and children. FQHCs outnumber Planned Parenthood’s approximately 650 centers, and many located in rural communities. In 2014, over 22 million Americans received care from health centers, according to America’s Health Centers. By comparison, Planned Parenthood centers only served 2.5 million.
FQHCs are able to provide annual exams, STD testing, all birth control methods, and everything else Planned Parenthood provides. FQHCs also offer many services that many Planned Parenthood centers do not: vaccinations, x-rays, vision and dental care, prenatal care, and primary care for families.
Congress’s budget reconciliation proposal would redirect a substantial amount of government funding that Planned Parenthood receives to FQHC.
Q: But doesn’t Planned Parenthood provide breast exams and other needed women’s health care?
A: Planned Parenthood offers very limited women’s health care services. Planned Parenthood’s own numbers document that it performs less than two percent of all women’s manual breast exams and pap smears in the United States annually, it doesn’t perform a single mammogram (although it lied for years that it did), and yet it commits over 34 percent of America’s abortions – over 320,000 annually. That’s 887 children a day who are dismembered, poisoned, or starved to death through different abortion methods. You can see more about how Planned Parenthood misleads the public about what it does by watching this short video.
The belief that if Planned Parenthood goes away, women will have nowhere to go for health care is absolutely untrue. Women seeking accessible, affordable health care can visit any one of the 13,000 plus Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) across the United States. Save abortion, FQHC provides all the reproductive health services that Planned Parenthood offers. (See previous Q&A above for more details.)
Q: Will the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) be able to handle an influx of new patients?
A: Yes. The over $500 million dollars of federal funding that Planned Parenthood receives (43% of its budget) would be redirected to expand and grow the thousands of FQHCs across the nation.
Under Obamacare, FQHCs currently receive about $2 billion federal dollars annually and serve over 22 million patients. Broken down, FQHCs spend $500 million to serve about 5.5 million patients, whereas Planned Parenthood received that amount to see less than 2.5 million low-income clients in 2014. Money redirected to FQHCs has the potential to serve twice as many clients as Planned Parenthood currently sees – for the same amount of money.
In addition to providing all the services that Planned Parenthood provides, minus abortion, FQHCs offer a wider range of services to patients than most Planned Parenthoods, including vaccinations, x-rays, vision and dental care, prenatal care, and primary care for families.
Q: Don't the majority of American women rely on Planned Parenthood?
A: No. According to Guttmacher Institute, in 2016 there were 67 million women of reproductive age in the U.S. Planned Parenthood only serves 2.5 million clients every year, which includes both men and women. Last year, less than two percent of American women visited a Planned Parenthood.
Over the last twenty years, the number of clients seen at Planned Parenthood has been decreasing. In 2014, Planned Parenthood saw 2.5 million clients — down 24 percent since 1996, when they saw 3.3 million. In contrast, FQHCs have increased the number of patients seen in each year since 2009. From 2009 to 2014, FQHC patients increased from 18.9 million to 22.9 million.
Q: Without access to Planned Parenthood, won't “back alley” abortions increase?
A: This is a common misconception given in favor of Planned Parenthood. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, abortionist and co-founder of National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), admitted how the numbers of illegal abortions were manipulated prior to the passage of Roe v. Wade, explaining, “We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200 – 250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000.”
Stats show that, in the year prior to Roe, the CDC disputed the lie that thousands of women died from illegal abortion as shown in this table (table 19) from their surveillance report on abortion.
Recent cases like Kermit Gosnell and the abortion-related death of Tonya Reaves (who obtained her abortion from Planned Parenthood) suggest that the premise that legal abortion is safer than illegal abortion is incorrect.
Q: What is the need to defund Planned Parenthood if federal funding cannot go to abortion?
A: The federal law in many instances does not allow for federal money to be used to pay for abortions directly, though there are many loopholes. Yet when the nation’s largest abortion chain gets hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to help with one part of its business, that frees up dollars to be used for other parts of its business, such as buying the buildings and equipment used to commit abortions.
Additionally, think of it in these terms: If there was a company that slaughtered puppies to make fur coats, but another part of their business was planting trees to help the environment, would you be comfortable supporting that company with hundreds of millions of your tax dollars, even if they only used that money to plant trees? Of course not. You would look for other companies that plant trees that don’t slaughter puppies.