Planned Parenthood lost 400k donors last year. These pro-life leaders think they know why.

In the January 30th episode of the 40 Days for Life podcast, former Planned Parenthood of the Heartland manager Sue Thayer, along with 40 Days for Life founder Shawn Carney and current 40 Days for Life campaign manager Steve Karlen, discussed the top five reasons they believe Planned Parenthood hemorrhaged 400,000 individual donors in 2019, representing a loss of roughly $40 million.

Reason #5: Planned Parenthood’s brand has been “marred by scandal, abuse, and fraud”

Sue Thayer recalled her time as a manager of an Iowa Planned Parenthood, pointing out how the corporation “did not like to report sexual abuse,” even though its employees were required to do so. Thayer noted:

Everyone there is a mandated reporter. Reporting any type of sexual abuse kind of puts the spotlight on the clinic, and they don’t like that. They don’t want the person that they’re reporting on angry at them, they want continued business. I vividly remember towards the end of my time there reporting one case of a minor who explained something that her dad had done to her. And I got in trouble for that. It was a founded case, but my boss did not like that I had called that in without checking in with them first.

Thayer also referenced former Planned Parenthood employee Mayra Rodriguez’s successful whisteblower lawsuit last year, when she was awarded $3 million in damages after being fired for reporting an abortion provider on staff who was “consistently injuring women to a severe degree.”

What’s more, Planned Parenthood executives have fraudulently claimed to provide mammograms and other care that they don’t actually provide. In December 2018, the New York Times published a much-talked about piece exploring allegations of pregnancy discrimination against current and former Planned Parenthood employees. Recently, Live Action News reported that a Planned Parenthood of Illinois employee embezzled $100k from the company between 2015 and 2017.

Thayer summarized, saying, “[Planned Parenthood’s] donors are watching all this,” seeing that there’s “no shred of integrity there.”

Reason #4: Planned Parenthood espouses “radical… views that no one can relate to” 

40 Days’ Shawn Carney and Sue Thayer both commented on Planned Parenthood’s attempts to hyper-sexualize children, including targeting pre-schoolers for sex-ed. Former Planned Parenthood manager Abby Johnson has noted in the past that Planned Parenthood “grooms children.” As previously reported by Live Action News, former sex educator Monica Cline “said she was told not to educate girls on sex, but to promote and encourage it, as well as contraceptives, with the goal of grooming girls to have abortions.”

Reason #3: “Planned Parenthood’s executive leadership is quitting or being fired”

Carney said Planned Parenthood is now searching for its third CEO in an 18-month period. “Although [former president Leana Wen] was a doctor, she wasn’t pro-abortion enough,” he said, which led to her firing. Planned Parenthood has an increasing focus on abortion, and a decreasing number of actual health care services.

Some have speculated that Planned Parenthood supporters may have been upset by the prolonged “unprofessional” haggling over Wen’s severance package months after her firing.

Reason #2: The fallout from the 2015 baby body part trafficking scandal continues

Five years later, Carney said, David Daleiden’s name and explosive videos investigating Planned Parenthood’s alleged baby body parts trafficking continue to be in the press. Carney said that one point everyone watching the videos could agree upon was that the Planned Parenthood staffers were referring to human babies, not to blobs of tissue or clumps of cells.

Carney surmised that the average pro-choice Planned Parenthood supporter watching those videos, even if they believed Planned Parenthood’s fallacious claim that the videos were edited, involuntarily responded with discomfort or disgust. In fact, Planned Parenthood lost $36 million in 2015 alone.

Thayer recalled the video of Deborah Nucatola, then a top-level medical director for Planned Parenthood, casually discussing deliberately altering abortion procedures to “crush above the thorax and below the thorax to keep the heart, lungs, liver and thymus fresh.” Clearly, despite Planned Parenthood’s massive PR efforts, the gruesome reality of its work can’t be completely whitewashed.

Reason #1: Late-term abortion and infanticide advocacy are out of touch with most Americans

Carney called 2019 “the year of infanticide,” as Planned Parenthood unequivocally supported legislation that would legalize abortion up to the moment of birth. But Carney said that the “climax” of it all was when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appeared to advocate infanticide, describing what would happen to a baby who was accidentally born alive after a failed abortion. That January 2019 legislation ultimately failed. Northam said, “the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.” (emphasis added) As Carney commented, and multiple polls have shown, the majority of Americans, including pro-choice Americans, do not support infanticide. Planned Parenthood’s staunch advocacy of late-term abortion and infanticide may have also caused them to lose donors who just want to support disadvantaged women.

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