Hollywood Actress Does Obama Ad for Planned Parenthood; Recycles PPFA myths
Planned Parenthood has Hollywood stars and starlets speak for the organization all the time. But the latest ad promoting Planned Parenthood comes with a twist – it’s not from Planned Parenthood, but from the Obama campaign.
The advertisement features Elizabeth Banks, star of movies like “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “The Hunger Games.” She talks passionately about how Planned Parenthood provides “essential services for women all across this country” and decries what she thinks is the overemphasis on “controversial services.”
Banks, of course, is recycling the old Planned Parenthood saw that “controversial services” –read abortion–represent only a small fraction of Planned Parenthood’s offerings. Having trotted out that misleading statement, she then tries to say that all the good Planned Parenthood does will come crashing down if Romney is elected.
We’ll report what she says and then point out its obvious flaws. Banks says,
“These services that they provide — what is it? Ninety-five percent of them don’t involve anything controversial, so for that little 5 percent that Mitt Romney decides he doesn’t agree with, he’s going to take away cancer screenings? What is he doing? He’s going to take people’s access to health care. We’re talking about working class ladies who need health care.”
“That’s Planned Parenthood,” Banks tells the camera. “I don’t know how a lot of communities could get by without them.”
Banks quickly pivots from there to the pro-Obama endorsement, saying “President Obama has not compromised on women’s rights. And that’s why President Obama needs to stay in office.”
At that point, the ad ends, with the familiar Obama circle logo sunrise over striped fields coming up and the website “BARACKOBAMA.COM/WOMEN” popping up along with buttons where you can ‘Sign up” or “Donate.”
That website is copyrighted and paid for by the 2011-2012 “Obama for America” campaign.
What to say?
For starters, what is surprising is not the misleading claims made about Planned Parenthood. Although they usually try to argue that abortion represents an even smaller percentage of the chain’s services, it’s a very, very familiar argument.
But this is perhaps is the first time that a presidential candidate, a sitting American president, has essentially sponsored a promotional ad for a private corporation. That it happens to be an ad for the nation’s largest abortion chain, responsible for more than a quarter of all abortions performed each year in the U.S., only makes it doubly shocking.
Though the canard of abortion’s being only 3% or 5% of Planned Parenthood’s services will be repeated over and over again in hopes that people will believe it, it must be challenged each time with these basic facts:
Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider and promoter, taking the lives of about 330,000 children a year and raking in a hundred million dollars or more in revenues from the grisly practice. And if Obama is re-elected, and ObamaCare fully implemented, his friends at Planned Parenthood stand to rake in hundreds of millions more.
It should surprise no one to hear that Planned Parenthood’s political arm has officially endorsed President Obama and has indicated in its endorsement announcement that it is “stepping up in 2012 to play a bigger role than it has ever before in the elections.” This ad from the Obama campaign seems to be evidence of the old adage, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
The ad never mentions the word “abortion” directly. Banks talks only of contraceptives and cancer screenings. The only oblique reference is to the 5% of services that may be “controversial,” for which pro-life candidate Mitt Romney would supposedly hold women’s “cancer screenings” hostage.
As Obama and Planned Parenthood hope many others will do, Banks never considers why, if all those other services are so essential and the “controversial services” constitute such a minute part of PPFA’s portfolio, why doesn’t Planned Parenthood just drop “controversial” services like abortion which cause so many in the public to feel queasy about supporting the organization with their tax dollars?
The truth, of course, is two-fold: (1) Abortion represents a much bigger part of Planned Parenthood’s agenda than Banks suggests; and (2) abortion produces enormous revenues, fattening PPFA’s bottom line.
Sometimes PPFA or its defenders talk about “controversial services” like abortion making up 3% or 5% or even 10%. The smallest figure, the 3%, is a figure they generate by counting each and every service equally – including many of the services that are sold with the abortion.
So a woman coming in for abortion will be sold not just the abortion but also perhaps a pregnancy test, an STD test, labwork like an Rh test, maybe an ultrasound, pain pills, and then could also be billed for contraceptives she takes home or even receives in the mail for the coming three months. Abortion is the basis for the entire commercial transaction, but by Planned Parenthood’s counting only represents a fraction of the total “services’ provided.
Toss in that abortion (the Guttmacher Institute says the average cost is $451 for a standard first-trimester surgical abortion) represents a considerably larger revenue stream than many of these cheaper ancillary services, and one readily sees how “essential” abortion is to Planned Parenthood.
Consider these “cancer screenings” that Banks talks about. Planned Parenthood’s 2009-2010 annual report says that it performed 747,607 “breast exams/breast care” services and 769,769 “Pap Tests” in 2010. That was against 329,445 abortions. Before deciding this is evidence that Planned Parenthood is indeed more concerned about breast health and cancer screenings than abortion, do the math.
Planned Parenthood’s Southwest and Central Florida affiliate (seven clinics in the Sarasota and St. Pete area) charges $89 for an annual exam that includes a pap smear and manual breast exam.[1] (As far as we have been able to tell, Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms.) Taking that as the base price for both exams together, and ignoring what other “services” may have been included in the exam, that yields just $68,509,441 in revenues. A lot, but wait until you see what they would have taken in from abortion.
By contrast, treating all of Planned Parenthood’s 329,445 abortions for 2010 as simple, first-trimester surgical abortions (even though we know that Planned Parenthood clinics advertise and perform more expensive chemical and second trimester surgical abortions), at the going rate of $451 Guttmacher gives us, that would equal $148,579,695 in revenue. That is more than double what Planned Parenthood would have taken in from breast exams and pap tests.
Whether Obama has done the math, we don’t know. He has obviously done some sort of political calculation with his campaign’s claim of the GOP’s alleged “War on Women,” thinking he can frighten women into believing that Republicans want to take away women’s mammograms and cancer screenings; this ad for Planned Parenthood is clearly a part of that.
What it really demonstrates, however is that Planned Parenthood and this administration will hold women’s health care hostage to this rabid, radical abortion agenda and that they’re teaming up to sell this bill of goods to the American public
