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 American Life League

DALLAS, April 12, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards said the media have played a pivotal role in helping the abortion industry communicate its message to America.

During the trying days since last July, when undercover videos shot by the Center for Medical Progress created a national backlash over Planned Parenthood's role in harvesting aborted babies' organs, the nation's largest abortion provider has tried to recapture the narrative.

“You’ve got 11 states that have been successful in cutting your funding,” an interviewer at the Dallas/Fort Worth Healthcare Daily said. “How do you get that message out above the rhetoric?”

Richards said the mainstream media have effectively repeated their message.

“The media has [sic] been incredibly important in not only talking about what Planned Parenthood does, but actually putting a human face on what it means when you cut healthcare,” she responded.

She highlighted Texas, where a law signed by then-Governor Rick Perry defunded abortion providers, while reassigning women's health care funds to community health providers.

Richards pointed to numerous news stories about how “women have lost access to birth control that they’ve counted on before, less access, and more unintended pregnancy there’s just a direct correlation.”

The nation's largest media outlets also failed to report on the CMP videos. According to the Media Research Center, the mainstream media did not report on seven undercover Planned Parenthood videos in a row. At the height of the controversy last summer, 70 percent of respondents to a YouGov poll said they had heard “little” or “nothing at all” about the videos.

Richards said, thanks in part to friendly media coverage, “there’s a reckoning day coming” for pro-life politicians.

“I believe in this election the rhetoric around Planned Parenthood, around reproductive health care access, around LGBT people is not going to go in the favor of folks who have been leading that charge,” she said.

She added carefully, “I’m speaking on behalf of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund,” which had endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and not on behalf of the nonprofit Planned Parenthood, which regularly reports income of more than $1 billion annually, half of it from taxpayer funds.