The Planned Parenthood abortion business has dropped plans to open a new abortion facility in Redwood City, California after city officials and a local Enterprise Rent-A-Car business refused to help it.
The city council in Redwood City, California, a town in the Bay Area, was to have the final vote next week to determine if a new Planned Parenthood abortion-referral business could open that didn’t have the required parking spaces.
Redwood City officials initially signed off on the new center, but the city’s planning department sent a letter in July saying it has amended the permit issued allowing it to open the abortion business at 2890 El Camino Real. Planned Parenthood had initially obtained an agreement from the Enterprise Rent-A-Car company across the street for it to provide the center with the additional parking necessary to meet city requirements as the location only has 18 of the 27 spaces the city requires for the facility.
However, Enterprise is backing down thanks to a local protest organized by pro-life advocate Ross Foti, who says he and other pro-life residents informed Enterprise they would picket the company if it provided the spaces to Planned Parenthood.
The Redwood City council had planned to vote on the matter on September 19, but the San Jose Mercury News reports today that Planned Parenthood will withdraw the bid to open the new facility — instead opening a new center in San Mateo. Lupe Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood, would not provide any further details to the newspaper on whether Planned Parenthood believed it would lose the city council vote or whether it found enough parking spaces to open.
“We have been working on this for a really long time,” Rodriguez said. “It just wasn’t moving at a pace that was good for us and good for the community we wanted to serve.”
“We’ve been working closely with city officials with San Mateo and we had a cordial welcome,” she said. “It’s been a great, problem-solving relationship.”
Foti said the decision to drop the Redwood City facility in favor of one in San Mateo was a case of good news, bad news.
“That’s a happy day for the pre-born babies, but I’m not happy to hear they opened in San Mateo,” he told the newspaper. “Looks like that’s my new spot for protest.”
The new abortion-referral clinic in San Mateo doesn’t require a use permit for the location at 35 Baywood Ave that was previously used by a legitimate health care business. Although abortions will not be done at the facility, Planned Parenthood staff will arrange for them by connecting pregnant women with their abortion centers elsewhere in the Oakland and San Francisco areas. Planned Parenthood does 135 abortions for every 1 adoption referral.
Planned Parenthood could still target Redwood City and Redwood City Zoning Administrator Blake Lyon told the newspaper Planned Parenthood could always submit a new application.
“They have every right to apply and have that go through a review,” he said. “We have to evaluate each proposal and each site on its own circumstances and merits.”
The Redwood City facility was slated to give women the dangerous abortion drug that has killed dozens of women worldwide, 14 in the United States (including one woman in San Francisco), and has injured at least 2,200 women in the United Sates alone as of April 2011 FDA figures. Pro-life advocates in the Bay Area area are working to stop the Planned Parenthood abortion business from opening up a new center and a dispute over parking is working so far.
The opening of the new center would follow the closing of a San Francisco area chain of abortion centers that lost its Planned Parenthood affiliation after the disclosure of massive financial problems.
Planned Parenthood Golden Gate was dropped as an affiliate of the national abortion business following allegedly massive financial mismanagement. Responding to the decision, the California abortion business changed its name to Golden Gate Community Health and fired CEO Dian Harrison.
Harrison filed a lawsuit for more than $180,000 in severance in December which came as the abortion business was struggling to stay open.
Satellite centers in San Rafael, Oakland, Hayward and San Mateo closed as well as San Francisco locations.
Golden Gate Community Health had been in operating since 1923 and did thousands of abortions annually until, in 2008-2009, it lost more than $2.8 million and lost $536,000 in 2010.
The problems were so pervasive at GGCH that it faces an audit from the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service. The New York Times released a new report in September detailing how an unnamed former employee interviewed with the Oakland field office of the IRS.
