Medical Groups Back Planned Parenthood, Ignore Mammogram Expose’

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Apr 4, 2011   |   5:09PM   |   Washington, DC

Two medical groups participated in a conference call today to urge support for Planned Parenthood in its battle in Congress to keep its massive taxpayer funding.

Representatives of the National Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists appeared on a phone call the abortion business arranged with reporters that also featured some of the strongest abortion activists in Congress.

The medical groups ignored the fact that Planned Parenthood is the nation’s biggest abortion business, doing more than 325,000 abortions annually, and an expose’ showing that none of its centers have mammogram machines capable of conducting proper exams of women when it comes to breast cancer. Still, Hal Lawrence, the incoming executive vice-president of ACOG, defended Planned Parenthood as a supposedly legitimate medical organization.

“ACOG simply cannot underscore enough how important the care that Planned Parenthood provides is to women’s health,” Lawrence said, according to a report in The Hill. “Politicizing women’s healthcare is dangerous and frankly unacceptable. Because of Planned Parenthood women are able to detect cancers early on, and to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a pro-abortion activist from Florida, also tried to gloss over the abortion business the $1 billion organization runs.

“Planned Parenthood doctors and nurses screen more than 830,000 women for women for breast cancer, and nearly 1 million for cervical cancer, every year,” she claimed.  “And for many of these women, Planned Parenthood is their only source of healthcare – whether it’s because they can’t afford health insurance, or because they live in a community … where Planned Parenthood is the only local provider of women’s health services.”

However, those breast cancer screenings are of the self-check variety that women can do on their own at home or with the help of a trusted friend or family member.

The Hill indicated representatives on the call indicated Planned Parenthood “says it doesn’t claim to offer mammograms – only referrals.”

But that’s not what Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told the media in interviews with CNN and on Joy Behar’s show.

“If this bill ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are going to lose their health care access, not to abortion services, to basic family planning – you know, mammograms,” she claimed.

Previously, LifeNews.com and pro-life blogger Jill Stanek followed up with phone calls to various Planned Parenthood centers and confirmed they do not do mammograms.

Recently, Live Action released videotaped footage of calls to 30 Planned Parenthood centers nationwide in 27 different states where abortion facility staff were asked whether or not mammograms could be performed on site. Every one of the Planned Parenthood centers admitted they could not do mammograms. Every Planned Parenthood, without exception, tells the women calling that they will have to go elsewhere for a mammogram, and many clinics admit that no Planned Parenthood clinics provide this breast cancer screening procedure.

“We don’t provide those services whatsoever,” admits a staffer at Planned Parenthood of Arizona while a staffer at Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health Center clinic in Overland Park, Kansas tells a caller, “We actually don’t have a, um, mammogram machine, at our clinics.”

Live Action president Lila Rose says the new recordings further confirm Planned Parenthood’s corruption.

“Planned Parenthood is first and foremost an abortion business, but Planned Parenthood and its allies will say almost anything to try and cover up that fact and preserve its taxpayer funding,” she told LifeNews.com. “It’s not surprising that an organization found concealing statutory rape and helping child sex traffickers would misrepresent its own services so brazenly, playing on women’s fears in order to protect their tax dollars.”

Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood director in Texas, also condemned Planned Parenthood’s misleading statements on mammograms.

“For so long PP has touted that they are a provider of mammogram services,” she said. “This is just one of the lies that Planned Parenthood uses to draw people into their clinics.  PP is not able to provide quality services on their own, so they are forced to lie to the public about services they don’t provide–and mammograms are just one of those services.”

Both Rose and Johnson call on Congress to revoke all taxpayer subsidies from Planned Parenthood. In the last reported year, Planned Parenthood received $363 million in government money.

ACTION: Contact the National Medical Association at https://nmanet.org/index.php/contact_us/ and ACOG at https://www.acog.org/from_home/proxy/