CV NEWS FEED // In order to improve women’s healthcare, Planned Parenthood should be defunded, a former director for the abortion giant who is now a pro-life leader, said in response to a February New York Times article titled “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis.”
Abby Johnson’s statement to FOX News Digital was one of numerous pro-life reactions to the Times’ Feb. 15 investigative report by Katie Benner.
“Even though I left Planned Parenthood years ago,” Johnson told FOX, “the same things are still happening inside their clinics across the country that I witnessed: using expired medications, high turnover, horrendous working conditions, unqualified staff, huge sums of money not being used for patient care, and disgusting conditions of the clinics.”
She pointed out that Planned Parenthood receives millions in taxpayer dollars and yet the “care” they provide is terrible.
“We can do better for women,” Johnson said, “and defunding Planned Parenthood is a great place to start.”
>>New York Times reports on Planned Parenthood under pressure: abortion giant faces ‘crisis’ <<
Pro-life advocates from a variety of organizations said that the pro-life movement knew about and tried to raise awareness of Planned Parenthood’s shortcomings for years.
Students for Life Press Specialist Mikayla Simpson wrote in a Feb. 20 article for SFL that the Times report didn’t surprise pro-lifers.
“Suddenly, it seems the mainstream media is catching on to what we have been reporting for years,” Simpson wrote.
Emphasizing a message similar to Johnson, she later wrote, “Women seeking medical care deserve better treatment [than] what Planned Parenthood gives them.”
Katie Glenn Daniel, director of Legal Affairs & Policy Counsel for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, also noted that the article reports on issues within Planned Parenthood that are long-standing.
“This is how Planned Parenthood has run many of its businesses for years, and for those of us who are deep in the pro-life movement, we’ve seen this,” Daniel said, according to the Christian Broadcasting Network.
National Right to Life Director of Education & Research Randall K. O’Bannon noted in a Feb. 18 article that the report indicates a shift in the media’s attitude toward the abortion giant.
For some time, Planned Parenthood has been “a media darling about whom reporters can never say a disparaging word,” O’Bannon wrote. “Until now.”
O’Bannon argued that the surprising part of the report isn’t that the abortion giant has problems, which pro-lifers have been trying to raise awareness of for years.
“It’s rather that the media, and, in particular, even the ever-so-august New York Times, is finally acknowledging that the nation’s premier abortion factory has feet of clay,” he wrote.
The underlying reasons for the report remain unknown, O’Bannon noted. Perhaps it is meant to be “a setup to push for yet more state and federal funding, part of a larger narrative of an evolving industry now dominated by abortion pill sellers rather than traditional brick and mortar clinics,” he wrote.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America CEO Alexis McGill explained her response to the Times article in an interview with MSNBC. McGill described the Times report as an “irresponsible piece of journalism” that lacked proper context. She said Planned Parenthood workers “are trying to provide care in a system that has very inequitable reimbursement rates.”
In her article for the Times, Benner reported that most of the money donated to Planned Parenthood Federation of America in the year after the overturning of Roe v. Wade went toward political efforts to keep abortion legal, not toward state affiliates.
O’Bannon noted that this too may have come as a surprise to many people who read Benner’s report.
“Pro-lifers have known about the poor quality of care often obtained at Planned Parenthood for a long time,” O’Bannon wrote. “But the elevation of abortion advocacy and corporate revenues over patient care is news to a lot of people.”
O’Bannon argued that the Times report also makes “clearer than ever” the fact that Planned Parenthood’s core priority “never was medical care for the poor, but abortion.”
The post Women deserve better: Pro-life advocates respond to NYT’s ‘Planned Parenthood in Crisis’ report appeared first on CatholicVote org.