Deception should be the abortion industry’s middle name.
It hides facts about unborn babies from their mothers. It denies the risks of abortion. With the help of its mainstream media partners, it misrepresents the pro-life movement and lies about our efforts to educate and empower women with the truth. It targets poor and minority women and then claims to be helping them. The list goes on and on.
This week, Willis L. Krumholz, writing for The Federalist, exposed another deception in a report from the Guttmacher Institute, the former research arm of Planned Parenthood.
In a March 2016 report, the pro-abortion research group presented data that appears to show how Planned Parenthood programs are reducing unplanned pregnancies. The data appears to show unintended pregnancy rates dropping among poor and low-income women at the same time when Planned Parenthood began promoting IUDs and other long-lasting, reversible contraception.
But Krumholz found a problem: Researchers left out some of the background data.
During the 1990s, many abortion clinics were facing financial difficulties, Krumholz explained. Amid worries of bankruptcy, Planned Parenthood implemented new strategies in the mid-’90s to generate more revenue. And as other independent abortion clinics closed, Planned Parenthood became a larger and larger part of the market, according to the report.
He continued:
[Planned Parenthood] had its turnaround, but the result for poor women wasn’t so good. They had little “choice” of contraception provider outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic. According to Amanda Marcotte, a left-wing blogger writing for the American Prospect, the average abortion patient used to be “[a] middle-class, white high-school or college student with no children whose bright future could be derailed by motherhood,” while today she is more likely “a twenty something single mother of color,” because of an unexplained “[l]oss of [birth control] access for poorer [minority] women” in the 1990s.
To back up this point, I’ve always used a graph … from Guttmacher, which shows unintended pregnancy rates for poor American women dropping until 1994, then skyrocketing by the next time data was collected, in 2001.
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But when Guttmacher released its most recent report on unintended pregnancies in the United States, in early March 2016, the original graph appeared, plus a new data plot for 2011, but minus the data plot for 1994 (see graph above and to the right). According to Guttmacher’s text that accompanied the graph, “After rising for most of the 30-year period beginning in 1981, unintended pregnancy rates among poor women have recently begun to decrease [emphasis mine].”
This is important: that 1994 datapoint showed that unintended births among poor women were declining before Planned Parenthood or the intrauterine device (IUD) came along, but quickly reversed as PPFA’s market share and competitive position strengthened. Then, around April 2, 2016, the new “smoothed” graph was oddly removed from the main press release, and the URL was changed due to a website update…
In 2011, LifeNews also reported about a Guttmacher study showing the policies of the abortion business promoting contraception and birth control to poor women aren’t working, as unplanned pregnancy rates are rising.
Krumholz said he tried to call Guttmacher numerous times to ask about the missing data, but no one has returned his calls.
He wrote: “The truth is that unintended pregnancy rates were falling until the mid-’90s and then they suddenly shot up. Why did they shoot up? If IUDs are so great, why was the unintended pregnancy rate lower in the early ’90s, before IUDs were as widely used? If Planned Parenthood is so great, why was the unintended pregnancy rate lower in the early ’90s, before Planned Parenthood tripled its market share?”
Perhaps it is because Planned Parenthood makes the most money from abortions, and it knows women with unintended pregnancies are its best targets. The abortion group even distributes low-quality condoms to its customers, knowing they will fail. A failure and an unintended pregnancy could mean a new abortion client and new revenue for the abortion giant.
UPDATE: After publishing this article, a representative of the Guttmacher Institute contested the premise that researchers hid data to make Planned Parenthood look better. He said the new report excluded the 1994 data because of evidence that the numbers are flawed. He pointed to a Centers for Disease Control report indicating that, due to methodological issues, the unintended pregnancy data from 1994 was artificially low.
