Planned Parenthood has refused to produce records that could prove it has irreversibly harmed children without parental consent as part of its booming transgender business — possibly with the collusion of the Biden administration, a state attorney general revealed this week.
Numerous transgender clinics in Missouri, including those affiliated with Planned Parenthood, have failed to comply with court orders supporting the state attorney general’s office’s probe of the statewide transgender industry, which began after a whistleblower uncovered serial irregularities targeting vulnerable minors. The attorney general invoked the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act (MMPA), which empowers the office to investigate any good or service that “[p]resents a risk of, or causes, substantial injury to consumers.” Planned Parenthood claimed it cannot release the documents due to the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA). Last Thursday, St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer ruled that Bailey has “broad investigative powers when the consumer is in possible need of protection,” since he is “investigating possible dishonesty by [Planned Parenthood] in their medical and billing practices.” Therefore, Planned Parenthood of St. Louis must “produce any and all documents not protected by HIPAA.”
Despite an unbroken string of legal victories against transgender facilities (including two Planned Parenthood affiliates), only one has turned over documents: Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City.
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
“We anticipate that there’s going to be negative findings from our investigation into Planned Parenthood,” said Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday.
“We have reason to believe that the Biden administration intervened with some of these agencies and asked them to look at HIPAA as an excuse to not have to turn over the records,” he added. “What’s most troubling about it is that several of the clinics had initially agreed to turn over the records we had subpoenaed. There were other clinics involved in addition to Planned Parenthood, and then they suddenly changed course after they had communicated with agents of the federal government.”
They may have had other reasons to fear exposure, Bailey continued. “The other clinics in the state of Missouri have a very poor history of informing parents about the dangers and the negative consequences associated with the … prescription of life-altering, powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones when there are zero FDA approvals for use of those medications in the treatment of gender dysphoria,” Bailey told Perkins. They also engaged in “denial of certain patients’ access to mental health assessments and traditional forms of mental health treatment like psychology or psychiatry,” he said.
Whistleblower Jamie Reed, who describes herself as a left-wing lesbian who supports Bernie Sanders, revealed that other medical personnel at the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center ignored known mental and psychological illnesses to fast-track minors into the medical pipeline. “[N]early all children who came to the Center here presented with very serious mental health problems,” including autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma histories, OCD, and serious eating disorders, wrote Bailey in The Free Press. She also described how doctors would pressure parents who had reservations about signing their child up for a lifetime of cross-sex hormone injections, falsely telling them their child would likely commit suicide without “gender-affirming hormone treatment” (GAHT).
Missouri legislators enacted a SAFE Act, protecting minors from puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and gender conversion surgeries. The center subsequently announced it had ceased transgender hormone distribution to people of any age.
Reed’s allegations fit broadly with the Cass Review, a comprehensive review of transgender medical and social procedures undertaken over four years by the British government by Dame Hilary Cass, a world-renowned pediatric specialist.
“The evidence that we have uncovered through our investigation into numerous clinics operating in the shadows across the state of Missouri is consistent with the evidence that came forth when the whistleblower swore out an affidavit making very specific and credible accusations about a clinic in Saint Louis” last February, Bailey said.
“There’s no medicine or science to back up these life-altering procedures, and that these clinics raced towards these procedures to achieve a social objective,” he said. “There were no clinical assessments done on the front end to determine whether the children would be better suited receiving more traditional mental health services, and certainly no tracking of the negative outcomes from these dangerous” drugs.
Bailey said he based his belief that the transgender facilities stonewalled his request on the fact that the nation’s largest abortion business demonstrated questionable ethics when it came to abortion. “The behavior of Planned Parenthood in the abortion context is to consistently place their desire to terminate and end human life ahead of the health and welfare of patients. And we believe that that’s going to be true in this context, the transgender context as well,” Bailey told Perkins.
Planned Parenthood sued to prevent parents from learning the details of their young teenage girl’s sexual molestation. In 2003, a 21-year-old soccer coach named John Haller began abusing a 13-year-old eighth grader. After he got her pregnant at the age of 14, Haller took her to Planned Parenthood for an abortion, posing as both her stepbrother and her father to authorize the abortion. Planned Parenthood sued all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court to deny her parents the right to view redacted medical records, which would have revealed whether the abortion business contacted authorities in accordance with applicable law. The records would also have shown whether Planned Parenthood has a history of covering up abuse.
Planned Parenthood began transitioning sharply to carrying out transgender procedures before, and especially after, the Dobbs decision threatened its abortion-focused business model. Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report, released this week, refused to specifically disclose how many transgender procedures the abortion franchise carried out in the last fiscal year, lumping its transgender business among 177,237 “Other Procedures.” The report revealed that 45 of Planned Parenthood’s 49 affiliates perpetrated transgender procedures in 2022 — up from 41 the previous year and just 30 in the 2020-2021 fiscal year.
The interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, Richard Muniz, called Bailey’s investigation a “sham” that constituted an “ongoing assault on Missourians’ health care.”
But Bailey promises, “My team will get to the bottom of how this clandestine network of clinics has subjected children to puberty blockers and irreversible surgery, often without parental consent. There is no more important fight than to ensure Missouri is the safest state in the nation for children.”
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
