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Leana Wen

CHICAGO, January 24, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― The new president of Planned Parenthood told a leading American medical journal that she thinks Roe v. Wade could be overturned within a year.

“We’re facing a situation where within the next year we could see Roe v. Wade overturned or further eroded,” Dr. Leana Wen told freelance writer Jennifer Abbasi. “There are more than 20 cases right now that are one step away from the Supreme Court that directly involve reproductive rights and health care.”

Abbasi’s January 23 article, an uncritical profile of Wen, appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Wen, 35, has been the president of abortion-committing Planned Parenthood since November 2018. A former child-immigrant from the abortion-extremist regime of Communist China, Wen believes that it is her responsibility to ensure access to abortion on demand.

“The threat to reproductive rights, the threat to abortion rights, the threat to women’s health care, is real,” Wen told JAMA. “We need to be doing everything we can to speak up on behalf of our patients. That’s our job – at the end of day – to talk about the impact on the patients that we serve.”

This pro-abortion panic over “the threat to abortion rights” is evident in the push for states to enshrine abortion in their laws and constitutions, as New York did earlier this week.

The new president took pains to describe Planned Parenthood’s business as basic “health care” and yet acknowledged that abortion is somehow unique.

“I have been deeply troubled in my medical career about how one aspect of health care is singled out, stigmatized, and attacked,” she told her interviewer.

“I went to medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, and I lived close to the Planned Parenthood there. I would see how, in order to get medical care, women in particular were having to walk past throngs of protesters,” she said.

“People shouting at them. Causing them fear and stigma [sic]. Just because they were trying to get something as basic as health care,” she claimed. “That’s what I bring to this role: the understanding that reproductive health care is health care.”

In addition to perpetuating the pro-abortion stereotype of pro-life sidewalk counselors as aggressive or “shouting,” Wen also did not acknowledge in the interview why proponents of the right to life single out abortion, i.e. that abortion ends the life of a unique human being.  

The new Planned Parenthood president has created an initiative to normalize abortion through a campaign called “This is Health Care.”

“This is Health Care emphasizes that the work that we do at Planned Parenthood, and more broadly the work of reproductive health and women’s health care, is standard medical care,” she said.

Wen stated that Planned Parenthood attracts 2.4 million “patients” who come to their over 600 “health centers” around the U.S. She claimed that Planned Parenthood is the “only source of health care” for many of its clients.

“This is where people come for breast and cervical cancer screenings, for sexually transmitted infection tests, for HIV tests, for their well-woman, well-person exams,” she said without mentioning that such Planned Parenthood services have been dwindling for years.  

But, as Wen underscored earlier this year, she believes peddling abortion and contraception is Planned Parenthood’s “core mission.” In her profile for JAMA, Wen protested the legal protections for the unborn and the conscience rights of employers.

“In the last seven years there have been over 400 restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights that have been passed on the state level,” she mourned.

“The Trump administration recently finalized a rule that would allow employers to deny women coverage for birth control. I mean, it’s 2018, and we’re still arguing about birth control,” the Planned Parenthood boss continued.

Wen was referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to end the federal requirement that employers violate their consciences to participate in the provision of employees’ contraceptives and abortifacient drugs.

The physician also admitted that Trump was making business difficult for Planned Parenthood in other ways.

“This is a difficult time for us,” she told her interviewer, saying she found it “unconscionable” that the Trump administration has proposed ceasing funding to entities that advertise or promote abortion to their clients.  

Planned Parenthood’s latest annual report, released this past weekend, revealed the organization aborted 332,757 babies last year and raked in $563.8 million from taxpayers. Abortion continues to account for 96 percent of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy-related services. The number of unique patients seen by Planned Parenthood also went down by 600,000 – a 20 percent decrease, according to the Susan B. Anthony List – and contraception, which many falsely push as an alternative to abortion, declined by more than 80,000 services.