There are some myths that just won’t die, and one of those myths was perpetuated in a Washington Post article on Wednesday. In a story on GOP efforts to redirect taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood to community health centers, the Post reports:
It is certainly true that Democrats have insisted that Planned Parenthood “provides” mammograms, but it’s also true that that claim is false (something the Post article doesn’t tell readers).
In 2011, pro-life activist Lila Rose released a video proving that Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards’ claim that the organization provides mammograms was not true. In 2012, at “the second presidential debate, President Barack Obama said that women ‘rely on’ Planned Parenthood for mammograms. Actually, mammograms are not performed at the clinics,” FactCheck.org reported. In 2015, one newspaper saw the claim repeated so many times, it published an article titled: “The repeated, misleading claim that Planned Parenthood ‘provides’ mammograms.” That newspaper was none other than the Washington Post, the same paper in which the claim it debunked in 2015 is now being repeated as if it were true.
The myth matters because it helped Planned Parenthood—an organization that commits more than 300,000 abortions each year—successfully bully a private breast cancer charity, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, to continue its funding of Planned Parenthood. The myth is now part of Planned Parenthood’s public-relations campaign opposing Republican efforts to cut off taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood and redirect it dollar-for-dollar to community health centers. Planned Parenthood and its supporters have often claimed that abortion makes up a tiny percentage of its activities. That claim is deeply misleading. (In principle, it shouldn’t matter even if it were true, but it does seem to affect how the public perceives the organization.)
The effort to defund Planned Parenthood was spearheaded in 2007 by then-Congressman Mike Pence and gained greater support in 2015 after an undercover investigation revealed that Planned Parenthood was involved in selling the body parts of aborted human beings to biotech companies.
