Anti-trafficking advocates react to Live Action video release

We have received the following statements from anti-human trafficking advocates regarding the video we released earlier today showing a Planned Parenthood of New Jersey manager aid what she thought was a child sex trafficker.

Jeffrey J. Barrows, D.O., M.A. (Bioethics)
Founder & Executive Director, Gracehaven
Director, Christian Trafficking Shelter Assoc

“As a healthcare professional actively fighting human trafficking, I know that traffickers will often take their victims to clinics to obtain abortions or STI testing. I find it appalling that there are people working at Planned Parenthood who are willing to help traffickers exploit young girls, but even more horrifying to realize they are being paid with my tax dollars!”

Statement of Steven Wagner
President and Founder, the Renewal Forum
Former Director, Human Trafficking Program, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

“The ‘Live Action’ video, filmed at a clinic in New Jersey, is profoundly disturbing.  It shows a putative health care provider willing to collaborate with a human trafficker in the sexual exploitation of a child.  Under U.S. federal law, any juvenile (under 18) who is subjected to commercial sexual exploitation is a victim of human trafficking.  Under our legal system, we hold that no child can give informed consent to engage in prostitution.  Similarly, no child who is trapped in a situation of commercial sexual exploitation can give informed consent for an abortion, or a regime of contraception.  Yet the health care provider in this video readily offers to provide the pimp’s victims with abortions and contraception.  Whatever the legal obligation this health care provider has under state law to report the serial sexual abuse of this child, the moral obligation of anyone encountering a juvenile victim of commercial sexual exploitation is to assist the child to escape or at least to alert law enforcement officials.  To provide abortions or contraception to a child who is being sexually exploited is to sustain that exploitation – just the same as the adult who pays for sex with a child sustains the exploitation.  It is incomprehensible that a health care provider is so eager to abet a trafficker, and for a national organization which receives public funds to support in this way our national epidemic of child sexual exploitation is vile. “