Snopes Defends Planned Parenthood; We Rate Them 'Mostly False'

Brittany M. Hughes | January 26, 2017
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The notorious fact-checking website Snopes rushed to the defense of Planned Parenthood following a report from Live Action released Wednesday, which exposed the fact that Planned Parenthood isn’t a primary provider of prenatal care as many organization supporters like to suggest.

In its exposé, Live Action called 97 Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation, posing as a customer and asking about prenatal care services. Only five clinics of those clinics stated they offered any form of prenatal care. In fact, most openly admitted that they specialize in "other options" (i.e., abortion) and therefore have no need to provide prenatal care services.

Despite this clear debunking of a common and consistently exaggerated Planned Parenthood myth, Snopes rated Live Action’s report as “mostly false.”

Why, exactly?

Well, Snopes asserts that Planned Parenthood has never claimed to provide prenatal services as one of its primary functions. This is despite Snopes’ own admission that they couldn’t explain this quote by Cecile Richards: "Prenatal care. These are the kinds of services that folks depend on Planned Parenthood for.” They also conveniently ignored multiple Planned Parenthood employees who were caught on camera admitting the organization’s name was “deceptive.”

Additionally, Snopes said they found 13 Planned Parenthood clinics in California and six in New York that offer prenatal services on their websites, proving that those women who want to keep their babies and happen to live in the Bronx have access to this type of health care.

Of course, that doesn’t really help if you’re pregnant, poor and live in Kansas. But oh, well.

Never mind that Planned Parenthood has more than 650 clinics nationwide, meaning these 19 clinics in two states make up less than 3 percent of all Planned Parenthood facilities. Snopes charged ahead, claiming:

Not only did Live Action present Planned Parenthood's comments without proper context, their investigation also presented a misleading picture about the services provided by the organization. We can't verify if every one of the phone call recordings offered in the above-displayed video was genuine, but we can say that the claim "only 5 [Planned Parenthood] facilities out of 97" provide prenatal care is misleading at best.

Here’s the problem with Snopes’ weak defense of Planned Parenthood. Let’s say Walmart openly and repeatedly claimed they sold purple bicycles, and that closing their stores would deprive millions of Americans of their ability to buy purple bicycles. You’d assume they actually sold a lot of purple bicycles in at least most of their stores, right?

But suppose Walmart only sold purple bicycles in Los Angeles? That would seriously deflate their argument. In fact, if you called the vast majority of Walmarts, only to be told they intentionally don’t sell purple bicycles because they’re too busy selling blue scooters, you’d feel pretty safe saying you can’t rely on Walmart for all of your purple bicycle needs.

No matter how liberals want to twist it, here’s the very simple bottom line: Planned Parenthood makes millions of dollars off taxpayers by claiming to provide necessary “health care” for women, especially those who are poor. However, the undisputable fact is that their clinics provide less than 2 percent of the nation’s breast exams and pap smears. They don’t offer mammograms at all. The vast majority of their non-abortion services include STD testing and birth control – services that are readily available at thousands upon thousands of clinics and community health centers across the country.

But while Planned Parenthood might offer prenatal services at a tiny fraction of its clinics every once in a very blue moon, they also provide more than a third of the nation’s abortions, performing more than 300,000 of them every year.

Based on the actual facts, we rate Snopes’ article as “mostly false.”

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