Planned Parenthood’s largest facility is shutting its doors 15 years after it first opened in Houston, Texas, in 2010, as more of the corporation restructures and moves its business online.
Key Takeaways:
- Planned Parenthood’s mega-center in Houston, Texas, is closing its doors along with another Houston location.
- The remaining four Planned Parenthood facilities in Houston will no longer be part of the Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast affiliate; they will be acquired by Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.
- Recently, when Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas closed its location in Tyler, Texas, it made clear that its business was actually moving online, where the Greater Texas Virtual Health Center and a Planned Parenthood Direct app would offer services.
- The Houston mega-center had been embroiled in scandal for years as part of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, and was one of the targets of an undercover investigation by the Center for Medical Progress. That group’s findings eventually led to the defunding of Planned Parenthood from Texas’ Medicaid program.
The Details:
Prevention Park, Planned Parenthood’s 78,000-square-foot mega-center in Houston, is closing down at the end of September. The move comes as part of an organization-wide restructuring, though Planned Parenthood executives are blaming the reconciliation bill that included a provision to defund the abortion giant —even though a judge immediately blocked the bill from taking effect and to date, it remains blocked.
According to Houston Public Media, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC) — which runs six facilities in Houston and two in Louisiana — will close two of the the Prevention Park and Southwest locations in Houston on September 30. On October 1, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas will acquire and take over operations of the four remaining Houston-area facilities. It oversees 18 other Planned Parenthood locations in Texas.
“And let’s be clear: having to reduce PPGC’s future footprint in Houston is heartbreaking, infuriating, and the direct result of these sustained political attacks,” claimed Melaney Linton, president and CEO of PPGC. “But by consolidating our service areas, we are minimizing impact on patients and protecting access for the long-term.”
In reality, Planned Parenthood has been shuttering facilities for years while setting up and expanding its telehealth and virtual health clinics to boost business. Visitors to the website for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas have two telehealth options: its Virtual Health Center as well as the PP Direct app.
The Virtual Health Center claims to offer birth control, the morning after pill (emergency contraception), “gender-affirming care,” HIV services, pregnancy testing and planning, STD testing and treatment, sexual and reproductive concerns, vaccines, and wellness and preventive care — all via telehealth.
The center also refers visitors seeking abortion to a page that offers a phone number to call the Greater Texas Virtual Health Center directly “for help getting an abortion” along with other abortion/abortion pill website links.
PP of Greater Texas refers to Greater Texas Virtual Health Center
The other telehealth option is the Planned Parenthood Direct app (PPDirect), which claims to offer emergency contraception, birth control, UTI treatment, the abortion pill (where legal), and at-home STD tests.
Several Planned Parenthood affiliates that are shuttering brick-and-mortar facilities (even in pro-abortion states like Illinois) are routing customers to these telehealth resources (as in the recent closure of one of its buildings in Tyler, Texas).
The Backstory:
The Prevention Park facility cost Planned Parenthood $16 million to build and was considered a “beacon of progressive healthcare” when it first opened its doors 15 years ago. However, it has been a source of scandal and controversy ever since. It continuously sent women to the hospital, including four women in less than a month in 2015.
In addition, Prevention Park was a named facility in the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) undercover video series released in 2015 that showed Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sales of body parts from aborted babies. The facility at that time was committing abortions in the first and second trimester, and footage filmed inside the center showed the then-Director of Research of PPGC, Melissa Farrell, referring to the body parts as “line items.”
“If we alter our process,” she told undercover reporters, “and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers [bodies], we can make it part of the budget that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this. It’s all just a matter of line items.” She also said that the increased price of those intact bodies could be “baked into the contract.”
Also in 2015, CMP recorded Tram Nguyen, who was then acting as the Vice President of Abortion Access with PPGC, overseeing all abortion practices at the mega-center. CMP also recorded abortionist Ann Schutt-Ainé, who was the Chief Medical Officer. They shared with undercover investigators how they (illegally) altered abortion procedures to skirting the federal ban on D&X (partial-birth) abortions in order to collect more intact organs from the babies they killed. In the recording, Nguyen can be heard saying that if people knew what she was doing, they would call her “f***ing evil.”
Video also shows Nguyen speaking about a set of 17-week conjoined twins, whose bodies were kept “in the freezer, because we were waiting for a funeral home to pick them up…” she said. “They were like the most intact because it was a fetal anomaly, the conjoined twins…. But I was like, ‘But it’s really cool though. There’s like three legs, and like two spinal cords.'”
Later that year, Texas officials began the process of terminating Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program as a result of CMP’s undercover investigation into the abortion giant. And in 2016, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast was referred by a U.S. House panel to Texas AG Ken Paxton for criminal prosecution as a result of the damning video evidence. But the defunding didn’t go into effect until a judge reluctantly upheld it in 2021. At that time, Judge Lora Livingston wrote, “[I]t is alleged that the state sought the terminations for purely political motives and without regard for the health and safety of the patients served by these medical providers.”
This is the same sort of argument used in the case before U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who blocked the federal Medicaid defunding of Planned Parenthood which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on July 4.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Texas enacted SB8, protecting preborn children from abortion beginning when a heartbeat could be detected, at about six weeks gestation. Planned Parenthood has not been actively committing abortions in the state since.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear in Medina v. Planned Parenthood that all states have the right to defund abortion providers including Planned Parenthood.
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