Planned Parenthood has had a bad month. Its president left the organisation last week after serving for less than a year, the Trump administration announced that federally funded family planning clinics that refer for abortions would lose funding under Title X, and a judge threw out the organisation’s claim in its lawsuit against pro-life activist David Daleiden that his investigative reporting incited “threats” and “violence”.
The White House backtracked slightly on Saturday, announcing that it would wait two months for clinics to prove they were no longer referring for abortions. But the new rule nevertheless represents a significant threat to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.
The organisation is reportedly forgoing Title X funds so it can continue abortion referrals, but up to this point, according to its own numbers, Planned Parenthood accounts for 41 per cent of all Title X patients.
The change is being challenged in court, but a federal appeals court overturned an injunction that would have prevented them from implementing it while the litigation is pending.
“Without reducing Title X funding by a dime, the Protect Life Rule simply draws a bright line between abortion and family planning, stopping abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood from treating Title X as their private slush fund,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B Anthony List, said in a statement.
Dr Leana Wen, Planned Parenthood’s departing president (pictured), wrote in the New York Times on July 21 about why she had been forced out of the abortion giant. In brief, “I was asked to leave for the same reason I was hired: I was changing the direction of Planned Parenthood.”
The difference in approach seems to be that Wen bought the organisation’s line that abortion was part of a wide range of healthcare options. She began moving it in the direction of providing more non-abortion care and de-emphasising the intense political role cultivated under her predecessor, Cecile Richards.
“I believed we could expand support for Planned Parenthood – and ultimately for abortion access – by finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who can unite behind the goal of improving the health and wellbeing of women and children,” Wen wrote.
She had also allegedly pushed back against some of the more ill-advised excesses of the progressive coalition. BuzzFeed News reported that “Wen also refused to use ‘trans-inclusive’ language … telling staff that she believed talking about transgender issues would ‘isolate people in the Midwest’ … She also
resisted using the word ‘abortion’ as a stand-alone term, preferring ‘abortion care’, or other phrases entirely.”
But Meghan Stabler, a transgender board member at Planned Parenthood, was quoted in a piece for NBC insisting, along with Wen, that transgender issues had nothing to do with her departure.
“I have spent a lot of time with Dr Wen around different things. I have never ever heard her comment about anything that should be said or done differently,” Stabler told NBC.
In the end, it turned out that their backers were more interested in politics, and the broad-spectrum healthcare argument was always more of a rhetorical sleight-of-hand than a sincere commitment. Wen made the mistake of taking it seriously.
“The fact that her tactics seemed to include centrist (if I’m being charitable) coalition-building,” wrote a commentator at the feminist website Jezebel, “at a time when abortion access is under more aggressive government attack than it has been in 46 years, is naïve at best.”
A comparable situation transpired in 1995, the last time someone with a medical background was the head of Planned Parenthood. Pamela Maraldo took a similar tone to Wen’s during the Clinton administration, and she was also ousted for it. Maraldo was asked by NPR this week about the longstanding tension between healthcare and advocacy in the organisation.
“It’s resurfaced because I think they hired a physician,” she said. “But it’s always dormant. And the fact is, their instincts were right, I believe, to hire a physician, a public health physician, because at the end of the day, if it weren’t a healthcare delivery network, they would be [the abortion lobby group] NARAL.”
Replacing Wen is Alexis McGill Johnson, who has been a board member of the abortion provider for more than a decade. She founded the Perception Institute, which studies bias, and crafted the curriculum for the entire cohort of Starbucks workers when the company closed for a “racial bias” training day last year.
That Planned Parenthood ousted a clinician and former healthcare commissioner of a major city in favour of a political organiser is a fairly strong indicator of where the group is going.
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