Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards has become pretty good at dodging questions that she would prefer not to answer.
Maybe that’s why they pay her close to $1 million a year.
Last week, Richards sat down for an interview with Kara Swisher at Recode, a media and technology conference in California. When asked about the impact social media has had on her abortion chain, Richards quickly brought up “fake news.”
Planned Parenthood’s claims about the Center for Medical Progress investigation quickly come to mind, but Richards refused to give any examples. Instead, she changed the subject and argued that Planned Parenthood has strong public support.
“I think we were one of the original fake news targets,” Richards replied.
Richards said that “there’s a lot of bad information out there” and efforts should be made to promote “sources and information that are actually good.”
Swisher asked Richards, “What’s the fakest information about Planned Parenthood out there? Give me an example.”
Richards hesitated, declining to offer an example of fake news about her organization, saying she would stay “positive.”
One of the things abortion activists have been crying “fake news” about the most is the undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood for potentially illegally selling aborted baby parts. Abortion activists have labeled the videos “misleading,” “heavily edited” and even “discredited,” but they have not been able to prove it.
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Richards’ “fake news” statement likely was a subtle reference to the investigation, but she could not give any evidence of them being fake.
Quite the contrary, two separate forensic analyses found the videos were not manipulated or tampered with. One extensive analysis found the only edits in the videos consisted of bathroom breaks and time eating meals. Even the forensic analysis paid for by Planned Parenthood reported “there was no ‘widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.’”
Abortion activists also claim that more than a dozen state investigations of the videos and Planned Parenthood did not find any evidence of wrong-doing. This is extremely misleading. In January, a U.S. House panel made 15 criminal and regulatory referrals to states involving the handling of aborted babies’ body parts by Planned Parenthood and other groups. A U.S. Senate investigation also made seven criminal referrals to the Department of Justice based on what it found. However, few mainstream media outlets reported on these findings.
The undercover videos were not fake, and Planned Parenthood would rather the public to forget about them. After CMP released its first video two years ago, Richards actually apologized publicly for the callous tone with which one of her employees ate salad and drank wine while talking about crushing unborn babies’ heads to kill them. Richards did not apologize for their deadly business, only how it was described in brutal honesty on camera.
As more videos came out, however, the abortion giant quickly switched to attacks against David Daleiden and others involved in the undercover investigation. It has worked hard to discredit and suppress the videos through campaigns and rhetoric.
CMP has released about a dozen videos in the past two years, and only a few have received mainstream media attention. Planned Parenthood does not want the public to see the gruesome truths that the undercover investigation exposed. It does not want the public to know that “choice” involves crushing unborn babies’ heads, pulling off their arms and legs, harvesting their organs and haggling with human tissue companies about money. Or that it receives about half a billion taxpayer dollars every year to continue destroying babies’ lives.
