Last month, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards appeared on CNN’s Joy Behar Show and argued that if federal funding was removed from her corporation, it would lose its ability to provide healthcare services such as mammograms:
If this bill ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are going to lose their health care access, not to abortion services, to basic family planning — you know, mammograms.
Anyone who has actually visited the company’s website to check knows that Planned Parenthood doesn’t actually provide mammograms. Under the section “Where Can I Get a Mammogram?” it clearly states: “Ask your health care provider, health department, or staff at your local Planned Parenthood health center about where you can get a mammogram in your area.” Translation: We don’t do that here.
Live Action found the same thing when they contacted 30 Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 states—none of them offer mammograms.
Many prolifers are claiming that Richards lied, but I think that is an unwarranted assumption. I suspect that she simply doesn’t realize that her company doesn’t provide the service. She probably saw that her website had a page on ” Breast Cancer Screening ” and presumed, without reading it, that this implied that they actually do mammograms rather than simply tell women they should contact a real healthcare provider.
No need to chalk up to dishonesty when simple ignorance is a sufficient explanation. And ignorance must be the reason because there is no way that Richards thinks that Americans are dumb enough to believe that PP needs millions of dollars to tell women, “Oh yeah, you should see a doctor about that.”
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