Video of misinformation in Planned Parenthood clinics shows ‘abortion-first mentality,’ Lila Rose says

Dec 10, 2009 / 05:13 am

A new undercover video from Live Action films shows Planned Parenthood staff offering inaccurate and contradictory information about fetal development and the risks of abortion. Lila Rose, the head of the investigation effort, says this is evidence of an “abortion-first mentality” at the organization.

Two female investigators entered an Appleton, Wisconsin Planned Parenthood abortion clinic with a hidden camera and asked a Planned Parenthood counselor if a pregnant woman’s 10-week-old unborn child has a heartbeat.

The counselor claimed that the unborn child has “heart tones” but the heart beat comes “when the fetus is active in the uterus—can survive—which is about seventeen or eighteen weeks.”

However, embryologists agree that the heartbeat begins around three weeks.

“A fetus is what's in the uterus right now. That is not a baby,” the counselor adds.

A press release from Live Action said that Wisconsin law requires that women receive medically accurate information before undergoing an abortion.

In the video Dr. Polhaska, the abortion doctor, said that at 10 weeks the unborn child is “not a baby at this stage or anything like that.”He also told the investigators that having an abortion is “much safer” than having a baby.

“You know, women die having babies,” he said, according to the video published on YouTube.

Live Action noted the recent resignation of Abby Johnson, a clinic director at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas.

In an interview, she said that the organization “really tries to instill in their employees and the women that are coming in for abortions that this is not a baby.”

“They don’t want to talk about when your baby has a heartbeat,” she said, because they don’t want to give the woman information that could give her a “connection” with her baby.

Lila Rose, a 21-year-old UCLA student and president of Live Action Films, charged that medical falsehoods and manipulative counseling are routine at Planned Parenthood.

"They will do or say anything in order to sell more abortions to more women, whether it is covering up sexual abuse or lying to women about medical facts," Rose commented. "Our team has visited dozens of Planned Parenthood clinics undercover. Planned Parenthood, while claiming to support patient self-determination, operates with an 'abortion-first mentality'."

"Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar organization with nearly $350 million of government funding, and stands to gain hundreds of millions more from national health care," Rose added. "Do we really want to subsidize an organization that gives women in need atrocious misinformation and predatory abortion practices?"

The Wisconsin Planned Parenthood video is the first in Live Action’s “Rosa Acuna Project,” which the organizers describe as a “multi-state undercover audit” that documents Planned Parenthood’s abortion counseling.

Previously, Live Action documented Planned Parenthood employees who were willing to conceal what they believed to be pregnancies conceived by statutory rape between a teen girl and a much older man. Fundraisers for Planned Parenthood also accepted donations purportedly targeting African-Americans for abortion.

The new video is at http://liveaction.org/rosaacuna