What does Planned Parenthood offer pregnant women? Little more than abortion

A new video just released from Live Action reveals that many pregnant women who contact Planned Parenthood facilities about their pregnancy options — adoption, for instance — are told that the only service the government-funded organization can offer them is abortion. In part one of this two part series, Live Action News will reveal what Planned Parenthood tells women who seek adoption services from the organization.

Live Action investigators contacted various Planned Parenthood facilities, some of which receive tax dollars from the federal family planning program known as Title X. According to requirements under Title X, projects that are funded must offer pregnant women several options regarding their pregnancies, including prenatal care and adoption.

The facility’s website acknowledges that if a woman is pregnant, she has three options to consider: “abortion, adoption, and parenting.” The website also suggests that “your local Planned Parenthood health center” has resources on adoption and the site tells women they can “get help finding adoption agencies in [her] area” through local Planned Parenthood facilities.

The abortion giant also claims (under the “adoption” option) to have “specially trained staff that can give you accurate information about all your options and other resources.”

What you will hear in the video below is how Planned Parenthood fails to offer Live Action’s investigators any of this — no adoption counseling, no adoption referrals, no list of adoption agencies, and no chance to speak with any so-called “specially trained staff” about the adoption option, despite online statements to the contrary.

Instead, what you will hear is that the only service these staffers seem willing to offer (over the phone, at least) is abortion:

Pregnant women call Planned Parenthood to hear about their options

Why, you might ask, would an abortion-focused organization even have adoption information on its website at all? (After all, according to its most recently published annual report, Planned Parenthood commits 114 abortions for every adoption referral it claims to make.) Well, one possible reason why Planned Parenthood might list adoption on its website is because Title X-funded facilities are are required to offer pregnant women adoption as an option in their pregnancy counseling.

An explanation of Title X, published in 2017 by the pro-abortion lobby group NARAL, states:

Pregnant patients must be offered the opportunity to receive information and counseling regarding “each of the following options:(A) Prenatal care and delivery;(B) Infant care, foster care, or adoption; and(C) Pregnancy termination.”The program must provide “neutral, factual information and nondirective counseling” and referrals.

Having a web page about adoption is one thing; actually helping women with the adoption option is completely another.  And although Live Action’s investigators did not identify as Title X patients, the stunning compilation of calls suggests there could be reason to suspect that these Planned Parenthood facilities may be failing to discuss all pregnancy options required to receive Title X dollars.

At the time Live Action investigators contacted the facilities, “Adoption,” in bold text, was listed at the top of each website. However, adoption referrals and/or adoption services are rarely offered. (Screen images of those pages were saved in the possible event that Planned Parenthood decided to purge the pages of the “adoption” text as it purged “prenatal care” after Live Action’s prenatal care investigation. Since this investigation, those pages have been updated but still include the three options.)

The Flagstaff, Arizona, website (a Title X facility), clearly showed “adoption” in bold text in the header (pictured right). However, when a Live Action investigator asked about the adoption services at that particular facility, the staffer responded, “We don’t have that here; this is Planned Parenthood.”

This also contradicts text on the website, where the organization claims to offer “adoption referrals” along with “a list of agencies.”

Why would Planned Parenthood offer nothing adoption-related even though it is listed on its website? Why would Planned Parenthood mislead women who visit this website, allowing them to think they can get information about adoption there?

Despite receiving $1,649,653 in government grants and contracts (13 percent of its overall revenue), Planned Parenthood of Arizona, which operates the Flagstaff facility, committed more than 50 percent of the state’s reported abortions in 2014 and 49 percent of the state’s reported abortion totals for 2015. According to the group’s 2014-2015 annual report, Planned Parenthood of Arizona’s abortions totaled 12 percent of the services (6,239) it provided. However, the way Planned Parenthood has always arrived at such low percentages for its abortion services has been found to be misleading, at best, even by news outlets like the Washington Post.

A Live Action investigator inquiring about adoption services at Planned Parenthood’s center in Eugene-Springfield (Oregon) was told by a staffer, “We do abortions here….” — a strange answer given to a woman calling about adoption. This particular facility is also a Title X-funded center, according to a 2017 state directory published online, and, like Flagstaff, this Planned Parenthood location highlighted adoption in bold text at the top of its website at the time of the call. However, since the call, the page was updated and still shows adoption referrals as a service.

It would appear that offering little more than abortion is becoming the status quo for Planned Parenthood.

In Texas, Planned Parenthood’s South Austin website states, “If you choose to continue a pregnancy, we will provide you with a list of resources to help you obtain prenatal care.” However, it was apparent when Live Action’s investigator contacted the facility to inquire about adoption (and obviously, a woman placing a child for adoption would need prenatal care) — no “list of resources” was offered. The staffer instead suggested that the caller should “find that information on Google.” In addition, the caller was told that the South Austin Planned Parenthood offers only abortion, while its website listing says other options are available there.

Interestingly enough, Google was also suggested as the go-to source when a Live Action investigator called Planned Parenthood’s facility in Dover, Delaware, looking for adoption services. In that call, the staffer suggested the caller should “go online and Google adoption agencies.”

The Dover location is listed as a Title X partner through the Delaware Division of Public Health, and like the other Planned Parenthood facilities, the word “adoption” was shown in bold text at the top of its web page. The updated page also lists adoption referrals as a service they provide.

Nationally, Planned Parenthood’s alleged adoption services are, for the most part, merely “referrals to other agencies.” In fact, “adoption services” did not even show up in the abortion giant’s service totals until 2005, as Live Action News previously reported. Prior to that year, those numbers were categorized as “referred out” and were not included in the overall services totals performed by Planned Parenthood.

Recently, a former staffer from Planned Parenthood publicly indicated to Live Action that the so-called adoption services are included for public relations purposes only. Today, despite the fact that Planned Parenthood receives Title X funding and masquerades as a health center for women, adoption services are down nearly 41% since 2007.

Live Action News has documented many ways which Planned Parenthood deceives the public and the media about the services it provides, including adoption services. More recently, Live Action News documented that while government funding to Planned Parenthood doubled over the past decade ($272.7 million in 2004 to $554.6 in 2015) and abortions have increased nearly 29 percent, many of the organization’s other services (like cancer screenings) have decreased substantially.

Today, it is becoming more and more obvious that despite deceptive rhetoric from pro-abortion politicians and Planned Parenthood spokespersons, the abortion corporation, which holds 34.9 percent of the market share of abortions nationally, needs to be defunded immediately.