AOL News ran a piece yesterday by Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood director who wrote the recently released unPlanned. In the column, she outlined the ways Congress and the American public have been misled by Planned Parenthood over the years.
Johnson would be in a position to know since she worked eight years for the organization, including two as director for a clinic in Texas.
Deception No. 1: Taxpayer funds don’t go to pay for abortions. This defies common sense and basic logic; of course taxpayer money helps to finance abortions at Planned Parenthood clinics.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Planned Parenthood gets one-third of its annual budget from taxpayer funding, and it performed a total of more than 650,000 abortions in just 2008 and 2009 (the last year for which figures are available).
Think for a moment how much it costs to pay for someone to perform the abortion, other medical staff for support, their health benefits packages and malpractice insurance to cover all of them, and then multiply it by more than 650,000.
As clinic director, I saw how money received by Planned Parenthood affiliate clinics all went into one pot at the end of the day — it isn’t divvied up and directed to specific services.
And while Planned Parenthood says abortions make up just 3 percent of its services, I found they used an sleight of hand, unbundling family planning services so each patient shows anywhere from five to 20 “visits” per appointment (12 packs of birth control would show up as 12 individual visits). It does the opposite for abortion visits, bundling them together so each appointment shows as one visit. This skews the numbers. You have an overwhelming number of “visits” for family planning compared to abortion, even though you may have seen the same number of patients.
Read the rest here.
(Hat tip: Abby S)