The anti-abortion movement’s fixation on Planned Parenthood stems in part from a long-running effort to paint legal abortion providers, and Planned Parenthood in particular, as a predatory “abortion industry” out to profit off the women they serve. This has led a number of activists to claim, in various ways, that Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion health care offerings — like affordable contraception and STI testing — are all part of a plot to eventually lure women into having abortions in order to line the pockets of the “abortion industry.”
Kristan Hawkins, the head of Students for Life, has been repeating this line for years and has recently taken to calling Planned Parenthood “the Walmart of abortion” in an effort to appeal to millennials who are wary of the influence of big corporations.
Hawkins laid out this argument in detail at a Students for Life conference in California last month, claiming that Planned Parenthood’s sex education, birth control and STI testing services are all part of their effort to get women hooked on Planned Parenthood so that they will eventually come back for abortions.
According to Hawkins’ theory, Planned Parenthood convinces teens to have premarital sex but provides them with ineffective condoms and bad advice about birth control, causing them to eventually get pregnant and need an abortion.
“We talk about their cycle,” she said of Planned Parenthood, “how they come to our schools, they won’t talk about abortion mills to our high schools, but they say, ‘Hey, when you’re ready to have sex, you know, you can try the whole abstinence thing, but when you’re ready to have sex, you don’t want to talk to your parents about it, just come to us, everything is confidential, we’ll give you condoms and birth control.”
“Tell your friends, do not use Planned Parenthood condoms,” she added, claiming that they are “the lowest ranked by Consumer Reports.” (A 2005 Consumer Reports review ranked one of the brands of condom distributed by Planned Parenthood lowest among a number of competitors, but said they were still safe to use; Planned Parenthood quickly redesigned the product.)
“They know if they get you coming to the clinics, they get you on this birth control, they give you these bad condoms, the sooner you will have sex,” she said. “Here’s a little hint if you don’t realize that, you start having sex early on, you’re going to have some heartbreak, right? So they know she’s going to fall in love with this guy, they’ll have sex, they’ll break up, then she’ll find another partner, another guy she’ll want to have sex with, but guess what? She’ll need to go get tested. So Planned Parenthood will be back there for her again for an STD test.”
She claimed that “Planned Parenthood doesn’t tell you” the importance of taking birth control pills at the same time of day and keeping them at a certain temperature “because they don’t care, because their plan is to get you coming back and back and back and back again until that day you’re facing an unplanned crisis, you think you’re pregnant. Who are you going to go to? Planned Parenthood, because they built a relationship with you.”
She said that this is why Students for Life promotes anti-abortion “pregnancy resource centers” so that they can “build that relationship with young people first before Planned Parenthood does.”
