Planned Parenthood recently announced that it will soon be opening a new killing center in the Dallas area. Because provisions of HB2 require that abortion mills meet ambulatory surgical center (ASC) guidelines, Planned Parenthood has purchased an existing ASC and is making minor renovations in order to use it for abortion.
The news comes after Planned Parenthood officials insisted that the perceived burden of converting their facilities into ambulatory surgical centers would be too great and would force them to cease their operations. Melaney Linton of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast said last year, “You can’t just do a few renovations and convert a facility that is already existing.” And yet, converting a “facility that is already existing” is exactly what Planned Parenthood is doing in anticipation of the new center in Dallas. These statements may have been made a year ago, but we have not conveniently forgotten them now that they firmly contradict reality.
And the contradictions don’t stop there; the announcement of the new Dallas facility also flies in the face of Planned Parenthood’s insistence that they care about “serving” women in rural areas of the state, where HB2 provisions have led to the closure of many substandard abortion mills.
HB2 opponents claim that Planned Parenthood is being forced not to stray from metropolitan areas due to the religious affiliations of rural hospitals. These opponents argue that the only hospitals to which rural abortionists have access deny admitting privileges on ideological grounds. But this excuse is a ruse that deters scrutiny of the actual reality, which is that Texas abortionists have a track record of being unable to obtain privileges even at secular hospitals in less-urban locales.
In reality, Planned Parenthood’s primary, secondary, and tertiary concerns are money, money, and… you guessed it, money. Rural facilities receive less traffic, resulting in fewer payouts, and less taxpayer reimbursement. This fact explains why we are seeing a continuation of Planned Parenthood’s predictable preference for high-profit abortion mills in metropolitan areas. Although the organization feigns concern for the “abortion care” for rural women, their mill-planting decisions paint a very different picture.
Texas Right to Life’s Emily Horne explained the hypocrisy of Planned Parenthood leaders to Breitbart in March:
Planned Parenthood always complains that there are only ASCs in five Texas cities–they've made such a fuss about there not being one in rural parts of the state like the Rio Grande Valley area. But then they go and build their new clinic in San Antonio, where there's already an ASC.
Planned Parenthood is now repeating its own self-contradictory history in Dallas (having already done so in San Antonio) with the conversion of an existing ASC into a Planned Parenthood abortion mill, adding to the number of HB2-approved killing centers that already exist in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Clearly, concern about “abortion care” for rural women is one of Planned Parenthood’s many image-preserving farces. The ASC provisions of HB2 are definitely inconvenient for the abortion industry in Texas. But they simply hold big abortion to the exact same surgical standards that all other medical professions meet. Abortion advocates have fought tooth and nail to be exempted (case in point) from requirements that force them to treat women like human beings (a far cry from how they treat the pre-born children of these mothers), but Texas voters have said No.
Real women’s healthcare, in reality, is being provided by the provisions found in HB2’s pro-woman legislation, not the money-grabbing abortion business of Planned Parenthood.