Remember Planned Parenthood’s claim that abortions make up only 3 percent of its services rendered? Well that’s extremely misleading. And Live Action has just come out with a video that makes the deception patently clear.
Released September 14, the video explained Planned Parenthood’s devious route to arriving at its broadcasted statistic. Live Action then did the math to show that in reality, 12.5 percent of women who visit the organization will receive an abortion.
So how has the 3 percent figure been so widely promulgated and accepted? With some clever massaging of the data, it seems. While abortion procedures make up 3 percent of all “discrete clinical interactions” conducted at Planned Parenthood clinics, those “interactions” can include anything from an STI test to a breast exam to the administration of contraception.
For example, if a woman went to a clinic for the sole purpose of getting an abortion, but she left with condoms in tow, her medical procedure would be considered only 50 percent of the visit. As the video stated, the abortion mill “count[s] all these services equally regardless of the cost, time or effort it takes to render” them. Thus, when the annual number of abortions that Planned Parenthood commits (323,999) is divided by the total number of annual services rendered (9,400,000), the result is 3 percent.
In a brilliant analogy, Live Action slammed Planned Parenthood by translating its logic to another large corporation. “It would be like the NFL saying that because they sold five million hot dogs in the season, and there were only 256 games, football is only .005 percent of what they do.”
Even before the release of the Live Action video, both conservative and liberal news outlets recognized the misleading nature of the statistic. The Washington Post fact checker gave the claim 3 “Pinocchios,” while Slate senior editor Rachael Larimore called it the “most meaningless abortion statistic ever.” Despite this, liberal pundits and politicians, including Stephen Colbert and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, continued to cite the 3 percent figure.
We can only hope this video will change that.
