Planned Parenthood is Still Covering up Child-Sex Traffickers

Planned Parenthood may have another PR nightmare on their hands.

Live Action, a pro-life organization conducted a new investigation where they discovered Planned Parenthood failed to disclose suspected child-sex trafficking to authorities, while also not training staff appropriately on how to report sex abuse cases like they promised to in the past.

Back in 2011, Live Action discovered that eight Planned Parenthood staffers in seven abortion clinics were willing to aid and abet sex trafficking on minors.  

Live Action investigators posed as child-sex traffickers and visited these Planned Parenthood clinics in Arizona, New Jersey, Virginia, New York, and Washington, D.C, where they asked the staff about obtaining contraception, STI tests and abortions for underage girls.

The video footage shows that the employees were more than happy to assist these “traffickers,” even though they were asking alarming questions about 14-15 year-olds. The staffers offered information about how to get abortions and birth control for these underage girls.

“The staffers said that Planned Parenthood clinics would always ignore parental-consent laws and perform abortions for underage girls involved in sex work, and they explained illegal methods of obtaining from clinics both birth control and abortions for minors without health insurance,” writes The National Review.

After Live Action released its findings, Planned Parenthood promised the media that the organization would train employees better to detect and then disclose information to authorities when they suspect sexual abuse of children.

Then the Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards wrote a letter to former general attorney Eric Holder stating that the organization had looked into the trafficking claims and then reported them to authorities. However, her letter only mentioned four of the five jurisdictions that Live Action called out in the investigation.  

Now years later, Live Action has proven that the organization did not follow through to report any trafficking cases to the police or did they train staff on how to detect and report these crimes.

“Contrary to the claims in Richards’s letter, recent Freedom of Information Act records showing requests made to state justice departments, police departments, and child-protective services in the jurisdictions targeted by Live Action’s original sting reveal that only one state, Arizona, had records indicating that a relevant report was filed with authorities,” writes The National Review.

Research shows that 30% of trafficking victims have visited Planned Parenthood facilities.

“Survivors [of human trafficking] also had significant contact with clinical treatment facilities, most commonly Planned Parenthood clinics, which more than a quarter of survivors (29.6%) visited. . . . Since pimps and traffickers generally exercise nearly complete control of their victims, these points of contact with healthcare represent rare opportunities for victim identification and intervention.,” reports Laura Lederer, a former human-trafficking senior advisor at the State Department.

But instead of trying to better protect abused children, the organization held a different training in response to the Live Action investigation. This training would only help the organization from being exposed for their shady practices.

“And in an interview with Live Action, former Planned Parenthood clinic manager Ramona Treviño said that instead of training employees to help trafficking victims, the organization held sessions on how to determine whether they were being secretly recorded. “That experience for me left me so disgusted that I couldn’t see how Planned Parenthood could ever redeem themselves after that,” Treviño said,” writes The National Review.

In the meeting, the Planned Parenthood officials played all of the footage captured from the Live Action investigation and they analyze it to help the managers better detect undercover journalists in the future.

“I said, ‘I’m confused. When are we going to actually begin the retraining? What can I do as a manager to take this information back to my staff and enforce policies and procedures that would help protect women who are experiencing either sex trafficking or sexual abuse in any way?’” asked Treviño and in response she was told, “We’re not here to talk about that, Ramona. We are here to teach you to identify if you’re being videotaped or recorded or entrapped in any way.” 

This is a completely different story that the one Planned Parenthood told to the press.  

“We were profoundly shocked when we viewed the videotape released this morning, which depicted an employee of one of our health centers behaving in a repugnant manner that is inconsistent with our standards of care and is completely unacceptable,” said Phyllis Kinsler, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Central Jersey after seeing some of the footage from the undercover operation at the Perth Amboy, NJ Planned Parenthood.

But again, this was just a lie told to the media to save face.

“When confronted with child sex traffickers, Planned Parenthood cared more about protecting its image than protecting children. It appears that many media outlets simply took Planned Parenthood’s word that it reported the suspected child sex traffickers to the proper local authorities,” said Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action.

“If Planned Parenthood can provide proof that it actually tried to protect children it thought were being forced into prostitution by reporting the suspected crimes to local law enforcement, we’d love to see the evidence.”

Here’s an example of how the organization’s shady business practices kept a 13-year-old girl in danger.

R.Z.,13, visited a Planned Parenthood in 2012 when she was taken in by her stepfather (with a different last name) to get an abortion. The clinic did not notify her mother or the authorities. After years of sexual abuse for her stepfather, R.Z. finally admitted to her mother what was happening. The mother then found out that organization did nothing to help her daughter and sued them for negligence, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and extreme and outrageous conduct.

There are much cases like this out there. The organization needs to be held accountable.