Planned Parenthood wants you to think it only kills babies occasionally.
It has pointed to its own dubious accounting to claim that abortion makes up just 3 percent of the services it provides, as if snuffing out the lives of unborn children sporadically somehow makes it more excusable morally.
But the truth is bad for the abortion business.
For years, it has guarded the 3 percent figure jealously, and a complicit press has reprinted it uncritically. Its former president, Cecile Richards, repeated it during congressional testimony. Journalists at CNN, Politico, and the New York Times publish it without qualification. It’s repeated so often, it has become an ironclad lie.
Unraveling the truth would be a disaster for Planned Parenthood. Congress might not write it as many taxpayer checks if the public learned that the largest abortion provider does, in fact, make its money by performing abortions — 328,348 abortions a year, according to its latest annual report.
A recent statement from current Planned Parenthood President Leanna Wen comes as a surprise, then.
Wen found the idea that her organization plans to focus on nonabortion services, the thesis of a recent BuzzFeed profile, offensive. She said the opposite. She screwed up monumentally.
“Our core mission is providing, protecting and expanding access to abortion and reproductive health care,” Wen tweeted. “We will never back down from that fight – it’s a fundamental human right and women’s lives are at stake.”
This is a landmark moment of honesty. If Wen can tell the truth about her abortion corporation, then maybe Planned Parenthood can finally do away with the 3 percent fabrication. Even though it has a free pass in the halls of Congress, the lie really is laughably false.
It requires truly crooked accounting. As Rich Lowry of National Review explains, Planned Parenthood arrives at the 3 percent figure by counting abortion like any other service. By its books, an abortion is the same as a simple pregnancy test or a quick STD screen. Count them all up, divide the number of abortions by the total number of other services, and voila: Planned Parenthood can say abortion is just a small part of what it does.
Not everyone has been fooled, not even more liberal outlets who might be more sympathetic. The fact checker at the Washington Post ran the numbers and found the 3 percent statistic “misleading.” She gave it three Pinocchios. Writing at Slate in May 2013, Rachel Larimore was similarly unimpressed. She called it “the most meaningless statistic ever.”
Now it seems that even Planned Parenthood agrees. Wen said as much. Abortion, it’s what they do. It is “their core mission.” So can we dismiss the 3 percent fantasy once and for all?
