Planned Parenthood's Web site for schoolkids, Teenwire, is up to its old tricks again, getting New York City writer Juliet Eastland to pen a scare story on what she claims is the deceptiveness of a pregnancy resource center in Minnesota "Inside a Crisis Pregnancy Center."
Eastland quotes a supposed insider at the abortion clinic across the street from the pregnancy resource center, whom she calls "Jane." No corroborating sources are offered, and Eastland makes no mention of any court proceedings being taken against the center for its alleged deception — even though if Planned Parenthood had any evidence of its writer's claims, it would certainly try to shut the center down.
It all sounds mightily like Planned Parenthood's fake story about a "fake clinic" in Indiana, which was similarly touted on its Web site and never proved.
Eastland's story includes the unintentionally humorous line,
"Having reaped about $30 million in federal funding since 2001, CPCs are now bringing their anti-abortion, abstinence-until-marriage message to schools"
Anyone care to calculate how much federal funding Planned Parenthood has received since 2001, while reaping a profit each year for the past several years? And what murderous "procedure" provides Planned Parenthood with its largest source of income?
Corrected 10:35 a.m.: "Jane" is not even an insider at the pregnancy resource center, as I had mistakenly gathered, but rather at the similarly named abortion clinic — which makes it even stranger that the writer would not give her name. Is she afraid of losing her job at the abortion clinic if she spills dirt about the place across the street? That wouldn't be likely if she were merely stating the truth. Again, if any of her accusations were founded, it would follow that Planned Parenthood would not merely pay a freelance writer to smear the pregnancy center, but would fund a lawsuit.
MORE: A friend writes:
Odd that PP is making such a big deal of Jane's anonynmity -- she's undoubtedly the Janet Nelson identified and pictured in this 2005 article about the controversy. Note that the pro-choice author of that article acknowledged that the alleged complaints against the CPC could be made up, and that when she called they didn't lie to her -- they just failed, in her opinion, to give the impression that they were an anti-abortion center. But the most ridiculous thing about the deception charge is that the across the street is the house with a banner attached to it with a picture of an 11-week fetus that reads, "You don't have to abort. Free help across the street."
