If you pay a visit to Planned Parenthood's Web site, you will find it adorned with words like "health care," "justice," "knowledge," "freedom" and "equality."
Words like these certainly lead one to believe this is an organization that really cares about women and people and wants to help them live better, happier lives. Even though I am very pro-life and take issue with nearly all of the services Planned Parenthood provides, I too would like to believe that at very least it is an organization with good intentions.
However, recent events suggest Planned Parenthood has anything but good intentions, and that it, in fact, might support activities that directly and explicitly harm women.
On Oct. 1, the Students for Life of America, a national organization that helps college students promote pro-life issues, released a video and an accompanying report that is absolutely disturbing.
In the video, a student from North Carolina State University uses a hidden camera to record her visit to a local Planned Parenthood where she poses as a 15-year-old girl seeking access to emergency contraception.
She clearly tells the attendants that she is 15 years old and needs the contraception because she recently had sex with her mother's boyfriend who is in his 30s. She provides them her full name, a phone number and even sets up another appointment to get regular birth control pills.
The problem is that what she describes to the attendants is a clear case of statutory rape.
North Carolina has mandatory reporting laws which require that, in a situation like this, where the attendants at Planned Parenthood have obvious evidence of rape, they report it to the police.
Even if it wasn't required by the law, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to expect that an organization that "cares about women" simply would not stand by and do nothing when presented with a clear case of rape. Yet this is exactly what Planned Parenthood did.
To their credit, the people at Planned Parenthood did inform the student that her sexual relationship was in violation of state law and that they were required to report the incident; however, the North Carolina police received no reports of statutory rape that day and still had not received any reports about this incident four months later when the video was made.
Well, maybe it just slipped through the cracks?
I'm not so sure.
The Students for Life of America video goes on to show another incident that occurs in almost the exact same way, only this time with a student posing as a 14-year-old girl at a different Planned Parenthood clinic.
Again, she claims to be in a sexual relationship with a man over the age of 30 and asks for emergency birth control. She gives them her full name, phone number and even her address. Yet again, Planned Parenthood failed to report the incident to the police.
This evidence, though it is particularly damning, comes as no surprise to pro-life advocates. For years several pro-life organizations have alleged that this type of activity has been going on within Planned Parenthood.
This video reinforces what we should already be aware of: Planned Parenthood is hiding statutory rape.
In 2002 a pro-life organization called Life Dynamics Inc. conducted a study in which a woman called about 800 Planned Parenthood Clinics and associated facilities, posing as a 13-year-old girl who was impregnated by her 22-year-old boyfriend. In each call she made her age and the age of her boyfriend very clear and asked for assistance in getting an abortion for the specific purpose of concealing their sexual relationship.
In the majority of cases the workers who answered the phone agreed to assist her in hiding this illegal sexual relationship.
In some cases they instructed her to call other facilities and lie about her and her boyfriend's age, and several clinics gave her advice on how to get around parental consent laws, sometimes legally and sometimes illegally.
According to the Life Dynamics report, in one case, "the clinic worker lamented the fact that, because [the] caller's boyfriend was only 22 he wouldn't look old enough to pass as her father."
Around 90 percent of the clinics contacted also agreed to help her acquire birth control so she could continue to hide an illegal sexual relationship.
Planned Parenthood is covering up rape, and it is clear that this is not just happening once in a while or in selected instances. Though the situations in the video and the study were fictional, the practices they expose are not. Planned Parenthood, by not reporting rape and helping to cover it up, is enabling rapists to continue to hurt their victims.
It's starting to catch up with them.
According to an Oct. 7 Associated Press article, the family of a 14-year-old who was impregnated by her 21-year-old soccer coach is suing an Ohio Planned Parenthood for failure to notify the authorities and to obtain parental consent for an abortion ("Ohio top court mulls Planned Parenthood files").
A Physicians for Life news release reports that in 2007, a Connecticut Planned Parenthood failed to notify police when a 14-year-old girl came in for abortions three times in six months after being impregnated each time by a 22 year old.
The list goes on.
What is going on at these Planned Parenthoods is absolutely despicable. It is a travesty that an organization that claims to care about women would directly engage in activity that hurts them so much.
Luke Fischer is a junior sociology major. You can reach him at lukefischer@dailynebraskan.com.
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