Thanks to ever-advancing ultrasound technology, we can see babies in the womb in astonishing detail like never before. This not only leads to improved quality of care for mothers, but it also shows whether babies are properly developing. Moreover, it highlights quite clearly that what is in the womb is a tiny, growing human being.
At just 3 1/2 weeks after fertilization, a heartbeat can be heard. At six weeks, hands and feet are seen developing. At seven weeks, the child can be seen sucking her thumb, stretching, and even sighing.
Yet at Planned Parenthood – which is at the center of a taxpayer funding debate in Congress – the hundreds of thousands of pregnant mothers who come through its doors and get ultrasounds never see the ultrasound images. Unlike at an OB/GYN’s office, at Planned Parenthood, the ultrasound monitors showing the developing child are only seen by staff.
Former Planned Parenthood manager Sue Thayer has attested that staffers deliberately “turn the monitor away so the mom can’t see it.”
But why is that?
Planned Parenthood hides those images from women because its best interests are not served by revealing them. The images would show the mother her child’s beating heart, tiny hands, and tiny feet. Those images destroy the abortion industry myth that her baby is just a “clump of cells” lacking humanity.
Without that myth, it becomes harder for the abortion chain to stay in business, as people begin to realize that living babies – not amorphous tissue masses – are being killed by abortions.
Keeping the ultrasound images from mothers makes it easier to convince those mothers that their preborn children aren’t really human yet and that abortion has about the same moral implication as removing a tumor.
Former Planned Parenthood employee Catherine Adair told the Washington Examiner in 2011 that workers would purposefully avoid providing information on what the child looked like, the child’s anatomical development, and the pain she could feel. She said that she was “continuously reminded that when referring to the baby, the appropriate terminology was ‘clump of cells’ or ‘contents of the uterus.'”
To the nation’s largest abortion chain, even a fully developed baby at nine months is not a baby or a person yet. The abortion industry’s training manuals advise that abortionists avoid using the term “baby.”
And defying all science, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards says that life doesn’t begin until a baby is born and out of the womb. “[F]or me,” she said, “life began when I delivered them.”
So, if Planned Parenthood doesn’t use ultrasound machines to show the amazing developmental milestones of children in the womb or to even check on the health of the mother or child, why does Planned Parenthood have ultrasound machines at all?
At the nation’s largest abortion chain, ultrasound machines are used for killing, not care. They most often are used to determine the gestational age and position of the baby in the womb before he or she is aborted.
Live Action recently investigated 68 Planned Parenthood facilities across the country. Our investigators, posing as pregnant women wanting to keep their babies, contacted the facilities asking to get ultrasounds to check on their own and their babies’ health. Our undercover recordings show the women being turned away at 65 of the 68 facilities. Those facilities that had ultrasound machines told our investigators that they only use them for abortions.
Planned Parenthood staff admitted things like, “We don’t do any ultrasounds for prenatal care. We do them for abortions,” and “We do have to do an ultrasound with an abortion, but we don’t offer them for – we can’t do anything to make sure that the pregnancy is fine.”
This raises two important questions. First, if Planned Parenthood truly believed in “choice” for women as it says it does, then why won’t it use its ultrasounds to help women have healthy pregnancies who choose to keep their babies?
Second, if Planned Parenthood genuinely believed in “choice,” then why does it hide pre-abortion ultrasound images from mothers? Why conceal the truth? Why not let them make the most informed choice they can?
Despite all of its rhetoric about choice and about providing women’s healthcare, Planned Parenthood is a business that makes its money from abortions. It performs roughly one-third of all abortions in the U.S., or more than 320,000 per year. Its last 10 years of annual reports (2005-06 to 2015-16) show that services like breast exams, Pap tests, and prenatal care have experienced huge declines (62, 74, and 29 percent, respectively), while the number of abortions it does rose 24 percent.
That’s why America’s largest abortion chain won’t show mothers the truth of the ultrasound: that there exists a tiny human being who happens to be smaller in size, but not in dignity, importance, or humanity.
Lila Rose is president and founder of the national pro-life organization Live Action.
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