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Now-fired Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen attends the Rolling Stone's Women Shaping The Future Brunch at the Altman Building on March 20, 2019 in New York City. Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images

February 21, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Planned Parenthood CEO Leana Wen sat down with presidential daughter Chelsea Clinton for a piece published in Interview Magazine this week, casting the abortion giant as an imperiled defender of women and claiming those who end preborn lives are the ones truly deserving the “life” label.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the interview was when the two ladies discussed the labels of the abortion debate.

“I also want us to consider our choice of language when we define these movements. The pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy is problematic to me,” Wen said. Clinton agreed, saying she “refuse[s] to refer to the anti-choice movement as anything other than anti-choice.”

“Our nurses and our clinicians are all here because we believe in life,” Wen claimed. “Being pro-choice is being pro-women. It’s being pro-family. It’s being pro-community. It’s being pro-life.”

While abortion defenders bristle at it for obvious reasons, there is no serious debate against the observation that abortion ends the lives of biologically-alive, genetically-distinct human beings, as admitted by many abortionists and some pro-abortion philosophers, such as authors Naomi Wolf and David Boonin.

Moreover, the vast majority of even late-term abortions are not sought for reasons that could be defined as “health care,” but rather for financial, relationship, or other personal considerations. In rare cases it may be necessary to deliver a baby early or administer life-saving treatment that could indirectly harm him or her, but pro-life OB/GYN Dr. William Lile and reformed ex-abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino agree that abortion itself is never medically necessary.

Clinton defended Planned Parenthood during her discussion with Wen.  

“Amid a political climate that has become increasingly hostile to women, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America stands as a leader of the resistance — one of the largest providers of reproductive health services in the country and a safe haven for those seeking safe, accessible healthcare,” Clinton, the daughter of former President Bill and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, declared in her opening.

Wen, who succeeded retiring Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards last fall, expressed fear that the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade and let states decide their own abortion laws, leading to new restrictions or outright bans on abortion. “None of these threats have anything do with medicine or science,” she claimed. “It has everything to do with power, with denying women bodily autonomy.”

She relayed a story about attempting to start a St. Louis chapter of Medical Students for Choice in 2001, and being outraged that it was required to “provide reproductive options education — meaning that for every pro-reproductive health, pro-science lecture that we gave, we also had to give a lecture on something that was not based on science, or evidence, at all.”

Wen didn’t elaborate on these alleged anti-science mandates, but likened them to oncologists being forced to balance lectures on chemotherapy with lectures on herbal remedies. “Reproductive healthcare has become siloed and stigmatized in a way that we don’t find acceptable for any other aspect of healthcare,” she said.

Framing abortion as healthcare has been a central focus of Wen’s tenure, though she does not grapple with pro-life arguments to the contrary. Last month, she inadvertently undermined those efforts by calling abortion Planned Parenthood’s “core mission.”

At one point of the conversation, Clinton complained about pro-lifers allegedly misinterpreting her recent comments that she wished her grandmother had been able to access Planned Parenthood's services as wishing her grandmother had aborted Hillary (her mom) and by extension prevented Chelsea from existing.

“It was my first, and hardly my last, experience with the bad faith in which the anti-choice movement operates,” she wrote, a curious claim in light of her past statements falsely claiming abortion was an economic benefit and repeating debunked myths about pre-Roe abortion deaths.