Planned Parenthood abortionist calls undercover videos ‘fake news,’ but is she spinning tales?

Dr. Savita Ginde, a Planned Parenthood abortionist caught on undercover video by David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress, has written a book, The Real Cost of Fake News: The Hidden Truth Behind the Planned Parenthood Video Scandal. The book’s description refers to The Center for Medical Progress as “unscrupulous… dishonorable shysters,” so you can guess where the book is going. In the book, she claims that the Center for Medical Progress videos are “fake news,” though she admits to never having actually watched the footage in which she is the subject, writing:

I had never fully watched any of my videos and I had no intention of ever doing so. I didn’t need to see any of that stuff, not even a snippet, ever again; it is all fake…. [Planned Parenthood] sent me a link for whatever compilation they created from all the fake videos, but I never clicked on it. I’m still not interested in anything related to Daleiden’s fiction.

In the video below, she can be seen examining the bodies of aborted babies and identifying their parts:

Planned Parenthood VP Says Fetuses May Come Out Intact, Agrees Payments Specific to the Specimen

Ginde writes in her book:

The entire video campaign that David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress created is based on lies. The facts were fabricated. The videos that included me were edited to manipulate context, with words and phrases that I never said dubbed in and attributed to me.

But even the forensic analysis commissioned by Planned Parenthood itself found no evidence of dubbed dialogue. The report states, “these analysts found no evidence that CMP inserted dialogue not spoken by Planned Parenthood staff.”

READ: Multiple reports confirm that Planned Parenthood videos were not manipulated

In her book, Ginde, who dismembers preborn children for a living, claims she has a high standard of honesty, and that lying “never felt right to me”:

My dad always talked about honesty, both as an individual and as a doctor. Very early on in my medical career, he reminded me, explicitly, never to lie about anything. And I’ve always been upfront – even as a little kid. If I got caught doing something wrong, I would always fess up and say, “Yes, I did it.” I wouldn’t lie. I wasn’t good at it because it never felt right to me.

However, Ginde tells two major lies on the very first page of her book. She makes the statements, “Less than 3% of what Planned Parenthood does involves pregnancy termination services,” and “One in five American women report having been to Planned Parenthood for care.” But the Washington Post — which Ginde suggests to her readers as a “reputable” news source — did a fact check on that 3% claim and said the figure “misleads the public,” giving it three Pinocchios.

To get this figure, Planned Parenthood separately counted every interaction as a service. If a woman came in for an abortion, the abortion would be one service, the anesthesia another, the pre-abortion ultrasound another, the pregnancy test another, etc. The Washington Post actually quoted the National Review, writing:

Such cracked reasoning could be used to obscure the purpose of any organization.

The sponsors of the New York City Marathon could count each small cup of water they hand out (some 2 million cups, compared with 45,000 runners) and say they are mainly in the hydration business.

Or Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season, so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do.

Debunking Planned Parenthood's "3%" Abortion Myth

Ginde’s other statement was also debunked by the Washington Post – the claim that one in five women depend on Planned Parenthood for medical care. The Post noted, “Using the 2013 Census data, that comprises 26 million women over 15 years old…. But that statistic is highly questionable. It is supposedly based on internal polling by Planned Parenthood, and its results and methodology has not been made available to the public.” Planned Parenthood’s own data shows that 2.7 million women (and men) visit Planned Parenthood centers a year. Since the statistic also includes men, the number of women must be less than 2.7 million – a far cry from 26 million.

READ: No, CNN, the Planned Parenthood baby parts claims weren’t ‘debunked’

No update has been forthcoming. Apparently, Planned Parenthood has not revealed how it came up with the “1 in 5” statistic beyond citing one online Huffington Post poll in which one in five female HuffPo readers claimed to have visited a Planned Parenthood. The Washington Post said this kind of polling “do[es] not meet The Washington Post polling methodology standards. The Fact Checker often has warned readers of relying on such polls.”

A small survey of readers from one extremely liberal news publication is not credible evidence for the statistic, especially when Planned Parenthood’s own numbers refute it.

As we can see, Ginde makes false statements from the very first page in her book about pointing out allegedly “fake news.”

Editor’s Note, 12/13/18: In the process of editing this piece, a quote was accidentally attributed to The Washington Post. This has since been corrected.