Planned Parenthood now finds itself being heavily criticized after being caught on tape brokering fetal body parts. Fortunately for them, they have no shortage of allies in the media, including PolitiFact.
Fox Business reporter Sandra Smith recently said on air “Almost 95 percent of all (Planned Parenthood) pregnancy services were abortions.” On Tuesday, PunditFact, a division of PolitiFact, rated it false.
PolitiFact concedes the source of this statistic is Planned Parenthood’s own annual report. If you take the number of services listed in the report, exclude the ones that don’t apply to women who aren’t pregnant, you do indeed get a figure that showing that over 94 percent of pregnant women who go to Planned Parenthood get an abortion.
After validating the source of the stat, PolitiFact then says, “For several reasons, that’s a misleading way to analyze the data.” That’s an odd statement because PolitiFact then goes on to provide one concrete reason for why the statistic is inaccurate. And it’s a very dubious rationale:
How many? It’s impossible to know.
Planned Parenthood does not record how many pregnant patients are referred to outside health care providers, said Catherine Lozada, a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman.
If referrals were included, the 95 percent figure would likely change, though we can’t say by how much — and neither can Smith nor the [pro-life] Susan B. Anthony List.
To what extent is a referral a service? Let’s say a woman walks into a beauty parlor and needs a manicure, but is told they don’t do manicures at this establishment and is told to go to another place down the road. Does the first establishment get credit for helping provide a service they don’t provide? Now it’s more complicated in the medical world, as sometimes you need a referral from one doctor to see another doctor or specialist. However, saying referrals to other doctors is a service Planned Parenthood provides — let alone one they conveniently don’t keep track of so that they can’t be pinned down on when asked how many abortions provide relative to other services provided to pregnant women — is quite a stretch. Especially when you consider that Planned Parenthood clearly tries to obfuscate how many abortions they perform.
Beyond that single dodgy reason declaring the stat false, PunditFact’s ruling explaining their decison is full of irrelevant bluster. (PolitiFact is basically notorious for padding their rulings with irrelevant facts and context to make their reasoning more opaque than it needs to be.) But what’s interesting is that in the process of explaining what’s going on with Planned Parenthood’s accounting of services provided, they manage to directly contradict another PolitiFact fact check. Here’s what PunditFact said in their ruling Tuesday:
But looking at the share of abortions per patient (and assuming one procedure per patient), the figure rises to 12 percent.
Some critics have taken issue with Planned Parenthood’s measurement of “services.” Performing an abortion is more involved than administering pregnancy tests or giving someone a contraception kit, for example. The share of abortions might be different if cost or hours of services were used. (However, that information is not in the 2013-14 annual report.)
In fact, the stat that only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion is so misleading, that the editorial board of USA Today has decided it’s not credible and they won’t use it for the exact same reasoning PunditFact lays out here.
Yet on Monday, the day before PunditFact cast doubt on the three percent figure, PolitiFact gave a rating of “half-true” to former Maryland governor and Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley’s statement, “97 percent of the work that Planned Parenthood does is about mammograms and preventative health.” That ruling completely reinforced Planned Parenthood’s obviously misleading accounting of services — e.g. if a woman comes to Planned Parenthood for an abortion, she is also given a 12-month supply of birth control prescriptions. Abortion becomes just one of 13 services given to the woman, even though the other services are really just tacked on to the primary abortion service being provided. Nowhere in Monday’s ruling did it point out the statistical prestidigitation involved in ignoring that abortion is a much higher percentage when you look at services per patient, rather than total services. It’s obvious such a measurement is meant to be intentionally deceptive.
So if PolitiFact is buying O’Malley’s reasoning on the 97 percent figure, why did they only give him a rating of “half-true”? Well, this requires further plumbing the depths PolitiFact’s own contradictions. Here’s what PolitiFact said in their Monday ruling:
Within the category of “cancer screening and prevention services,” Planned Parenthood said it offered 487,029 breast exams or breast care services in 2013. However, as we’ve noted before, Planned Parenthood clinics do not provide mammograms themselves.
To be emphatically clear, Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms — zero, zip, zilch, nada — even though Planned Parenthood, the media, and abortion supporters have often disingenuously suggested that they do mammograms because support for breast cancer services is obviously more popular politically than abortion. So O’Malley get’s a “half-true” because PolitiFact said while the statistic he used is true — even though this is the same statistic PolitiFact undercut the next day — what O’Malley said about mammograms is not true. However, PolitiFact is again being obtuse. Rather than point out that it’s obviously misleading for O’Malley to suggest Planned Parenthood does mammograms, PolitiFact hedges because simple math shows that Democratic politicians get the benefit of the doubt at PolitiFact, whereas GOP politicians don’t. “So O’Malley’s 97 percent figure has some basis — that’s the percentage of Planned Parenthood’s services that aren’t abortion. But that’s a broader category than ‘mammograms and preventative health,’ which O’Malley said,” concludes PolitiFact.
But we’re not done yet! PolitiFact says, they’ve “noted before” Planned Parenthood doesn’t do mammograms. If you follow the link in PolitiFact’s statement, that refers to a 2012 fact check on the matter involving President Obama who said, “There are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for not just contraceptive care; they rely on it for mammograms.” Incredibly, that statement was given a rating of “half-true.” How on earth can you rely on Planned Parenthood for mammograms when they don’t do them? How is that not completely false?
Well, PolitiFact credulously relies on a statement from Planned Parenthood saying, “women rely on Planned Parenthood for referrals” to get mammograms. Thus, the circle of specious logic, contradictions, and generally biased reporting is complete. At PolitiFact, it’s errors all the way down.
Follow Mark Hemingway on Twitter @Heminator
