Planned Parenthood announced earlier this year that Cecile Richards would be stepping down as president of the nation’s largest abortion business. Although the initial announcement came in January, the organization was mum about who would be replacing her. Briefly, Texas’s “Abortion Queen” Wendy Davis flirted with rumors of taking the helm of America’s abortion corporation, but she has been passed over. At long last, Planned Parenthood announced the new president of the organization is Dr. Leana Wen.
Wen has an impressive resume as an emergency room doctor with a long list of professional appointments and accomplishments, most recently serving as health commissioner of Baltimore. At first glance, Wen seems an odd pick for Planned Parenthood. Medical services provided by accomplished doctors are not Planned Parenthood’s specialty. Over the past decade, non-abortion services plummeted. The few medical services that Planned Parenthood offers, such as pap smears and STI testing, continued to decline, as noted in the latest annual report, and the overall number of patients who accessed health care services at Planned Parenthood is significantly lower than in 2006 when Richards took over the position. The number of mammograms remained steady at zero, because Planned Parenthood does not and never did provide mammograms despite relentless publicity stating otherwise.
Over the twelve years of Richards’s leadership, Planned Parenthood’s market share of abortions in the United States grew, and Richards’s salary ballooned to nearly $1 million. Clearly, Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business and has given no indication of advancing legitimate health care for underserved populations.
Why then is Wen taking over as president? The short answer seems to be that America’s largest abortion business is trying to legitimize abortion “care” and maintain Planned Parenthood’s illegitimate stream of fungible taxpayer dollars. The timing of the video message from the incoming president, during the confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh and leading up to the midterm elections, seems carefully calculated for maximum political effect.
In the video, Wen describes her family’s experience as immigrants from China who relied on assistance programs and “Planned Parenthood for health care.” She describes with some harrowing details the experience of treating a young woman who died in the emergency room following an at-home abortion and seems to suggest that legal, taxpayer funded abortion is “the basic right to health care.” She talks about wanting “to fight for our most vulnerable individuals” and insists that people go to Planned Parenthood for health care and not “to make a political statement.”
These items bear some examination. A young woman dying from an at-home abortion is a horrific tragedy, but taxpayer funding of the legal killing of innocent preborn human beings is not a solution to this tragedy. The reality is that legal abortion at Planned Parenthood has tragically killed young women in addition to their preborn babies. Women in crisis need real solutions, not abortion. If Planned Parenthood is not concerned with making political statements and rather wants to be seen as a neutral health care organization, why did they register patients to vote? Why did Planned Parenthood Action Fund sink $30 million into the failed presidential campaign of one of their favorite anti-Life radicals?
The appointment of Wen as president of Planned Parenthood might seem unexpected. Wen is the first doctor to lead the abortion business in 50 years. Some Pro-Lifers express hope that her appointment may signal a shift in the anti-Life strategy of an organization that kills more than 320,000 preborn babies in abortions each year. This seems unlikely. The dead give-away that Wen is leading Planned Parenthood to push abortion and legitimize deadly violence against the preborn occurs when Wen insists, “Reproductive health care is health care. Women’s health care is health care,” while letters flash across the screen with a blindingly bright background. From the context (and the fact that anything else would not require these statements of the obvious), Wen is clearly talking about abortion. No matter what Wen says, and no matter who the president of Planned Parenthood is, abortion is not health care. Abortion is the ending of an innocent human life.