Politifact: Planned Parenthood Serves Few Prenatal Clients

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jul 18, 2011   |   5:03PM   |   Trenton, NJ

Politifact, the fact-checking web site of the mainstream media, set out to disprove comments by a pro-life New Jersey legislator, only to validate the argument that the Planned Parenthood abortion business helps few pregnant women.

The fact that Planned Parenthood helps relatively few women are who are pregnant and want to carry to term and are considering that as an option is well established.

A factsheet the Planned Parenthood Federation of America prepared about its own figures earlier this year shows Planned Parenthood provided prenatal services to merely 7,021 women and referred only 977 women for adoption services. These numbers were a 25 percent drop in prenatal care clients and a whopping 59 percent decline in adoption referrals from the 2,405 adoption referrals in 2008. The abortion business helped only 9,433 prenatal clients in 2008, down substantially from the 11,000 women it provided prenatal care to in 2007 — showing health care given to pregnant woman has fallen substantially over the years.

As a result, 97.6 percent of pregnant women going to Planned Parenthood are sold abortions while less than 2.4 percent of pregnant women received non-abortion services including adoption and prenatal care. That’s up from 96.5 percent of pregnant women going to Planned Parenthood getting abortions in 2008.

Recently, when lawmakers in New Jersey debated whether or not to override a veto pro-life Gov. Chris Christie issued revoking taxpayer funding for the abortion business through the state family planning program, Republican Sen. Michael Doherty argued that the abortion giant does little to help pregnant women.

“There’s a lot of talk about prenatal care and the fact is that Planned Parenthood just does not provide many prenatal visits. It’s about 140 visits for each state in the entire country,” said Doherty. “So we’re talking (about) an organization we’re supposed to be sending people we care about to get top-notch care for prenatal visits and it turns out that they don’t really see a lot of patients.”

Politifact rated the argument “false” but admitted that Doherty’s point is valid. The fact-checking web site claims the argument is false merely because Doherty confused visits to Planned Parenthood with clients. That’s not surprising given that Planned Parenthood prefers to talk about visits rather than actual clients served because when one person visits Planned Parenthood multiple times for the same service — such as repeatedly coming back for contraception or birth control — that helps the abortion business hide the fact that a significant percentage of its clients (actual number of women served) are related to abortion rather than non-abortion services.

Poltifact admits this point, saying, “PolitiFact New Jersey found that Doherty, a conservative, was right about prenatal care representing a small part of the services offered by Planned Parenthood. Figures provided by Planned Parenthood confirm that prenatal care represents a small part of the services offered.”

“But for his overall argument that Planned Parenthood sees few prenatal patients, Doherty is right,” the fact checking web sites continues. “According to the same fact sheet, “other women’s health services,” which includes prenatal care, only accounted for 10 percent of all services provided by Planned Parenthood nationwide in 2009. According to figures provided by [Michele Jaker, executive director of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of New Jersey], prenatal clients represented about 0.6 percent of the 91,617 patients served by New Jersey centers in 2009.”

Politifact goes on to talk about the fact that not all Planned Parenthood centers are equipped in New Jersey to provide any help to pregnant women, citing the Planned Parenthood executive admitting that, while it has the ability to do abortions, Planned Parenthood often refers pregnant women to other agencies in a community that provide tangible support and assistance to pregnant women.

“If there are enough providers who do prenatal care for low income women, it may not be a service we need to provide,” Jaker admits. “We could cover the needs of our patients through referrals.”

Marie Tasy, the director of New Jersey Right to Life, commented on the Politifact article.

“Although Politifact went out of their way to declare Senator Doherty’s claims false, an important fact was exposed in between the lines; namely,that prenatal care services are a very small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s services,” she explained. ” In their 2009 Annual Report, Planned Parenthood Federation of America listed only 7,021 prenatal care clients and 977 adoption referrals.  In the same year, they performed over 332,000 abortions. This means that 97.6% all services Planned Parenthood provides to pregnant women are abortions.”

“We don’t need “Politifact” to tell us that Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortions in the nation.  The numbers speak for themselves,” she concluded.