Hillary Clinton Misleads About Planned Parenthood: "All Kinds of Cancer Screenings"

Planned Parenthood's Purported 'Referral Services' to Outside Mammogram Facilities are Negligible 

By Stefan Ferrar
Church Militant

Hillary Clinton is again claiming Planned Parenthood should not be defunded owing to its providing of important medical services. In Wednesday's presidential debate between the Democratic nominee and Republican candidate Donald Trump, Clinton claimed Planned Parenthood (PP) provides "all kinds of cancer screenings and other benefits for women in our country." The veracity of those statements has been called into question by multiple sources, however, and by PP's own statistics.

In 2011, Cecile Richards, the president of PP, claimed in an interview that millions of women would lose their access to mammograms if PP was defunded, even though PP doesn't provide mammograms. An investigation by Live Action of 30 PP clinics in 27 states provided evidence that PP provides no mammograms.

And Washington Post's fact-checker stated in a 2015 article, "When Democratic lawmakers or other supporters assert that Planned Parenthood 'provides' mammograms, this is highly misleading language because it could be interpreted to mean that the group directly administers the x-rays." In fact, the group does not provide mammograms at all, but merely refers women to other medical facilities who do provide them.

In spite of PP's attempt to frame its services as largely non-abortion-related, the main source of revenue for PP has been and continues to be abortions. According to the watchdog group Stop Planned Parenthood, PP's abortion income in 2010 was 51.5 percent of its clinic income. From 2000–2011, PP went from performing 197,070 abortions which was 15 percent of all abortions in the United States to 32 percent, as PP in 2011 performed 333,964 abortions.

According to the Heritage Foundation, "Planned Parenthood affiliates perform about 20 abortions for every prenatal care visit and about 200 abortions for every adoption referral based on the approximately 300,000 abortions they perform each year."

Planned Parenthood's referrals of women for mammograms, and other medical services are a negligible portion of PP's operations, but abortion is the mainstay and cash cow of PP. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the average cost of a surgical abortion is $451, while chemical abortions are even more expensive, and becoming more frequent. PP's own statistics show that they make more than $148 million on abortions alone, with over 91% of PP's pregnant patients choosing to get an abortion.

The abortion giant's practice of referring women for mammograms isn't unique to PP, but is also the same practice as that of the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the American Cancer Society. 

According to National Review's Michelle Malkin, "Planned Parenthood's purported 'referral services' to outside mammogram facilities are negligible — especially given the widespread availability of these and other free and low-cost breast and cervical cancer screening services across the country, supported by both private and public grants."

Website: churchmilitant.com

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