One such center in Indiana shares a parking lot with a real Planned Parenthood clinic, and was designed expressly to lure our patients and deceive them. Recently, people from the fake "clinic" waged a campaign of intimidation and harassment against a 17-year-old girl who, with her mother and boyfriend, came to what she thought was our clinic for an abortion. Over the following days, the anti-choice extremists called the police to say the girl was being forced to have an abortion, showed up at her home, called her father's workplace, and even went to her school and urged classmates to pressure her not to have an abortion. The worst part? Your tax dollars are funding these "crisis pregnancy centers" to the tune of $60 million.
Sure, it's a legitimate concern that "crisis pregnancy center" is not a national organization and these centers may be extremist organizations.
But I'm having trouble believing that this story happened. First, too much identifying information has been taken out. Since they've already stated that her school and much of her community has been privy to her stolen personal information, why wouldn't they at least state what town this happened in?
If I do google searches (both news searches and web searches) for various combinations of indiana, "crisis pregnancy center," "planned parenthood," "harassment," "clinic," "abortion," and so forth, I get absolutely nothing relating to this, except for occasionally the story on the Planned Parenthood site.
This seems odd. There is really no way that this could have happened as the story describes and not have hit several major news sources. It's clearly newsworthy, and there were several opportunities for the media to hear about it. Police dispatches are all listed in a public record, which is mainly viewed by journalists. A call regarding "a minor forced to have an abortion" would certainly have prompted journalists to investigate. Harassment at a public school would certainly have caught media attention, as would people showing up at the girl's home.
I've e-mailed Planned Parenthood with these concerns and asked if they can point me to a version of the story in a mainstream news source. I will update if they respond.
Planned Parenthood is a really good organization that provides valuable services; I'm not going to continue to support them though if it seems they're making up stories in order to sway politicians and financial supporters.
5 comments:
any word if this is legit or not? someone just posted about it on my group's blog, www.queertoday.com, and i wasn't sure what to think...
Well, they still haven't written back. It seems really really fishy that it's not popping up in any other news source -- especially after PP has published it.
Eeka,
I'm impressed that your radar went up so quickly on this. Most pro-choice sites have just cut and pasted the e-mail into their blogs as a public service announcement. Obviously, those of us on the anti-choice side of this are skeptical, and you can read our concerns here and here).
Please note that we don't approve of what the CPC is alleged to have done, and have called for it to be closed down if the allegations are true.
Welcome to Planned Parenthood's reality. Having family in Fort Wayne, IN it sounds like this may be the town because the Planned Parenthood clinic is right next to a crisis pregnancy center and they both rent parking spots in the same lot.
The newest development I know of is Planned Parenthood building a clinic in Aurora, IL, where we recently moved, under the name of Gemini Medical Office and not a person in the city knowing it was Planned Parenthood until it was nearly complete. Deception doesn't sit well with me.
Medical facilities are free to contract out work and/or to bill under various practices they might be affiliated with. It's very common. Surely you've looked at medical bills or your insurance statement -- you see someone at one hospital and your bill lists services that match up with what you had done, but broken up and billed to various hospitals and group practices. Most major hospitals have several named groups they'll bill to, usually with generic names like "[botanical or landform name] physicians group."
But as long as they're upfront with you about who is performing the services you seek and what kind of license the person has, how is it really deceptive?
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