Investigative report: Planned Parenthood’s systemic complicity in sexual abuse

Live Action has recently released a powerful docuseries demonstrating Planned Parenthood’s decades long complicity in the cover-up of sexual abuse. An investigative report has also been released, detailing some of the horrific cases covered up by Planned Parenthood, which receives millions in taxpayer dollars annually, including Title X funds. It also reiterates how abortion enables sexual abusers by aiding them in the ability to cover their crimes.

The report, “Aiding Abusers, Planned Parenthood’s cover-up of child sexual abuse,” (which can be read here) adds to the mounting evidence of Planned Parenthood’s history and corporate culture of failing to report incidents to authorities. Areas of evidence in the report include:

1. Court cases including testimonies of victims experiencing horrific abuse

2. State health department records

3. Testimonies from former Planned Parenthood workers

4. Two Live Action Undercover investigations

5. Loyola University study on sex trafficking

The report states:

While Planned Parenthood frequently attempts to establish itself as a leading advocate on this critical issue, it is actually one of the biggest accomplices to child sexual abuse in the nation. Despite Planned Parenthood’s public rhetoric as well as state and federal laws requiring it to report suspected abuse, its failure to report has been deliberate and widespread.

Time and again, rather than reporting suspected abuse to authorities, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly looked the other way, performed abortions on victims as young as 12 years old, and then returned those victims into the waiting arms of their abusers. Planned Parenthood’s repeated failure to report such incidents has allowed abusers to continue abusing their victims, often for years.

This reputation has led to Planned Parenthood becoming a haven for sexual abusers and sex traffickers. Planned Parenthood is a favorite place to take their victims to cover up their crimes.

Live Action acknowledges the contributions of other pro-life groups to the report:

Although Live Action has documented many of Planned Parenthood’s failures and cover-ups, many other groups, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, Life Legal Defense Foundation, Life Dynamics, Americans United for Life, and others, have participated in legal actions or have collected reams of documents from lawsuits, court filings, and regulatory agency reports. Their work has contributed significantly to Live Action’s report.

It then summarizes a few of the lawsuits that have been brought against Planned Parenthood, incident reports from state regulators, as well as criminal cases against abusers who used the organization to cover their crimes. Some of those cases have also been detailed in Live Action’s newly released docuseries, Aiding Abusers:

Sex Abuse Cover Up at Planned Parenthood - Recorded Cases

The report states:

[T]his report only represents a sampling of the cases that have occurred at Planned Parenthood over the years. Moreover, these are cases that have only come to the attention of authorities because a parent, a friend, or a victim herself came forward. Because many cases of sexual abuse are never reported, no one knows how many victims are actually still suffering at the hands of their abusers.

For clarification, Live Action News’ summaries of the cases (below) may read differently from what has been published in the Congressional report.

Criminal cases: 

• Arizona – Tyler Kost: According to news reports as well as the sheriff’s report, Planned Parenthood allegedly told a 15-year-old rape victim it wasn’t worth the “hassle” for them to report her rape to police, then also allegedly miscoded the incident as “consensual” sex. On Feb. 10, 2017, the abuser, Tyler Kost, was sentenced to three years in prison in this serial sex crimes case.

• California – Edgar Ramirez: Edgar Ramirez raped his 13-year-old daughter and impregnated her two times, resulting in two abortions at Planned Parenthood. The abortion center told the 13-year-old after her first abortion: don’t have sex for three weeks; after her second abortion: get an IUD. Both times, they neglected to report suspected abuse and sent her back to her father, who continued to rape her. Ramirez was finally arrested several months after the second abortion — and only after the victim’s older sister, who had also been sexually abused, reported his crimes to the police. The trial court sentenced Ramirez to life in prison.

• Washington – George Savanah: Planned Parenthood failed to alert authorities after committing each of three abortions on a minor, allowing her father to continue raping her for seven horrific years. George Savanah repeatedly raped his daughter and impregnated her when she was 14, 16, and 17 years old, then brought her to Planned Parenthood to cover his crimes. The court document reveals that Savanah took the victim to two different Planned Parenthood facilities for abortion procedures. Planned Parenthood neglected to report any of the three suspicious incidents to authorities. Savanah was sentenced to 120 months for all counts plus 18 months community custody, which he appealed.

Lawsuits against Planned Parenthood for failure to report sexual abuse: 

• Arizona: Planned Parenthood committed an abortion on a 12-year-old at the request of her foster brother, 23-year-old Shawn M. Stevens, who then took her home and continued to rape her. Facility staff failed to notify authorities about the abuse, it continued, she got pregnant again, and a lawsuit later filed against the organization by the victim states that Stevens took the victim back to the same facility six months later for a second abortion. Days after performing the second abortion for the sexual predator, Planned Parenthood reported the suspected abuse, and Stevens was finally arrested.

•  Ohio: Planned Parenthood ignored the pleas of a 16-year-old girl who was pregnant by her father and refused to report the rape to police. Seeing a chance to escape the abuse she had endured for three horrible years, she told the staff that she was being raped. Instead of helping her, they ignored her pleas and refused to comply with Ohio’s mandatory reporting law. In her lawsuit, victim Denise Fairbanks claimed that Planned Parenthood’s “don’t ask/don’t tell” practices caused her to suffer additional abuse.

• Ohio: The victim’s 21-year-old coach, John Haller, impregnated her and took her for an abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Southwest Ohio, telling staff over the phone that he was the 14-year-old girl’s father. The facility committed an abortion without her parents’ knowledge. Despite her age, the facility’s staff did not report any suspected abuse to authorities. Shortly after the abortion, Haller resumed having sex with the victim. As a result of a subsequent report made by a teacher, Haller was later found guilty of seven counts of sexual battery. Planned Parenthood eventually settled a lawsuit brought by the victim’s family.

Health Department Reports:

• Alabama: In 2014, the Alabama Department of Public Health conducted an on-site survey and cited Planned Parenthood of Alabama in Mobile for a failure to report suspected child abuse. At another Planned Parenthood in Alabama, this time in Birmingham in 2009, Alabama Department of Public Health inspectors found the abortion center failed to report the suspected sexual abuse of a 13-year-old who had two abortions within four months.

• Pennsylvania: In 2013, Pennsylvania Department of Health inspectors conducted an annual survey of a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood and discovered that despite the fact that some girls it saw admitted to being sexually active since the ages of 11 and 12, in at least six instances, the abortion corporation did not inquire about the possibility of sexual abuse, nor did staff report the cases to authorities, as required by law. In an inspection of another Philadelphia Planned Parenthood a few weeks later, inspectors discovered two more instances of possible child sexual abuse that employees didn’t report.

In addition, the report details a 2008 Live Action investigation in which undercover investigators posed as 13-year-old girls impregnated by 31-year-old men, and a 2011 Live Action investigation in which investigators posed as pimps prostituting 14- and 15-year-old girls. In both situations, Planned Parenthood employees were repeatedly caught on camera offering to cover up abuse and help with abortions and getting around parental notification laws.

The report also notes how the abortion corporation lied when it claimed it would retrain staffers, as documented previously by Live Action News here and here.

It then quotes from a lengthy sex trafficking study, reported about previously by Live Action News. The 2014 report, published by the Loyola University Chicago’s Beazley Institute, “The Health Consequences of Sex Trafficking,” highlights how pimps force their victims to get abortions at Planned Parenthood so they can quickly get them back onto the streets. The report notes that survivors had “significant contact with clinical treatment facilities, most commonly Planned Parenthood.” In fact, the organization was the top-most visited facility for trafficking victims, second only to hospital emergency rooms.

One survivor quoted in the report said that the reason she was taken to Planned Parenthood was “because they didn’t ask any questions.”

The report points out that Planned Parenthood is one of the largest recipients of federal Title X dollars. As Live Action News has previously documented, all indications are that Title X requires recipients of government dollars to comply with all federal and state laws involving the reporting of sexual abuse. In 2015 alone, 474 of the organization’s facilities received funding from the federal program. Rules recently proposed by HHS seek to enforce this requirement.

Live Action’s Lila Rose stated in a press release:

Despite Planned Parenthood’s public rhetoric as well as laws requiring it to report suspected abuse, its failure to report has been deliberate and widespread. Time and again, rather than reporting abuse to authorities, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly looked the other way and performed abortions on victims as young as 12 years old. These girls deserved advocacy but instead Planned Parenthood staff ignored their abuse and returned them to the waiting arms of their abusers.

Because of flagrant violations like these, the proposed Title X rule tightening on reporting abuse is absolutely necessary. Planned Parenthood has proven that its priority is selling abortions, not caring for the most vulnerable of girls. Planned Parenthood’s culture of cover-up must end, the cycle of abuse of innocent children must end, and Planned Parenthood’s half a billion dollars in annual federal funding must end. Taxpayers cannot be forced to subsidize these abuses of children.

The investigative report, which contains information known in the public record, comes as the silence has finally been broken surrounding serial sexual abusers in Hollywood, the media, politics, and elsewhere. Now, it’s time for the silence to finally be broken about the nation’s number one abortion provider, one of the sexual abuser’s favorite accomplices. It’s time for politicians, media and Hollywood to reject Planned Parenthood’s complicity in sexual abuse by aiding abusers.

Read the complete report at Live Action’s Aiding Abusers website.