Silent partners
Crime: Does Planned Parenthood help those who victimize underage girls by failing to report their crimes?
Planned Parenthood’s Auburn Avenue
clinic in Cincinnati
At Planned Parenthood of the Southwest Region, a clock is ticking. Not only does the Cincinnati branch of the tax-funded abortion giant have to respond to the lawsuit a young Ohio woman filed on May 7, but the suit contains some of the most damaging evidence yet of what pro-life activists have been saying for years: that Planned Parenthood clinic workers ignore suspected sexual abuse of minor girls despite "mandated reporter" laws that require them to report such abuse to authorities.
Evidence of the practice has been piling up for at least five years:
* In summer 2002, Life Dynamics (LD), a Texas pro-life group, went public with a nationwide sting operation that caught hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinic workers on tape conspiring to conceal statutory rape. An LD activist posing as a 13-year-old girl made pregnant by a 22-year-old man called every Planned Parenthood clinic in the country. A call to an Iowa City clinic yielded a typical response: When the "girl" asked the clinic
worker whether Planned Parenthood would "tell anybody" of the illicit relationship, the worker replied, "Absolutely no one at all, and you will pay cash for this if you have this abortion, and there is no paper trail." When LD published the results of its telephone operation, Planned Parenthood issued a flurry of statements saying its workers always report suspected sexual abuse.
* In March 2005, the parents of "Jane Roe," a 14-year-old Ohio girl, sued Planned Parenthood for allegedly failing to report the statutory rape of their daughter by her 21-year-old soccer coach. The coach began having sex with the girl when she was 13 and in 2004, took her to Planned Parenthood for an abortion, paying for the operation with his credit card. An attorney for the group said the man actively misled clinic workers, posing as the girl''s stepbrother. Regional Planned Parenthood CEO Susan Momeyer called the allegation of rape cover-ups "an old charge without foundation."
* In May 2007, pro-life activist Lila Rose, an 18-year-old UCLA sophomore, visited two Los Angeles Planned Parenthood clinics with fellow activist James O''Keefe, 22. Rose concealed a camcorder in her pocket and pretended to be 15 and pregnant by O''Keefe, who said he was 23. Rose videotaped a Planned Parenthood clinic worker coaching her to falsify her birth date in order to conceal statutory rape. A worker at a second clinic told Rose and O''Keefe that she had been pregnant at age 17: "If I would do it again, I would not continue the pregnancy," the worker told the couple.
Rose and O''Keefe posted their tapes on YouTube, igniting a brief and exclusively conservative media storm. Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California Kathy Kneer admitted to CNS News that the clinic employees had broken mandated reporter laws. Then on May 14, Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles president and CEO Mary-Jane Wagle sent Rose a letter threatening to sue her if she did not remove the videotapes from the internet and turn over the originals.