(LifeSiteNews) — Planned Parenthood itself directed much of blue states’ legal war on lawful pro-life activists and crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), according to a newly-obtained document.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 restored the elected branches of government’s power to directly ban abortion, Democrat leaders at the local, state, and federal levels quickly launched a wide range of strategies to preserve abortion “access” and find new ways to shield the industry.
The Daily Signal reports that, one month after the ruling, Progressive State Leaders Committee policy director Brittany Jenkins forwarded to state attorneys’ general across the country Planned Parenthood’s 14-point response plan.
Among the advised actions were to issue statements reassuring the public of their “commitment to protecting abortion access”; “allocate funding to cover the costs of abortion services”; “clarify ambiguities” in existing laws; and work on state-level constitutional amendments to insulate abortion, all of which blue states would go on to do.
Particularly noteworthy, however, were bullet points pertaining to the rights of pro-lifers and services for women who make a different choice.
“Work with law enforcement to protect clinics, patients, and staff, including providing training for local and state law enforcement on existing state laws,” one reads. “States should utilize all state laws, including state FACE Acts, to protect health care facilities that provide abortion.”
The federal Federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and state counterparts ostensibly criminalize attempts to obstruct the entrances to any medical facility, but in practice were one of the Biden administration’s favorite tools to prosecute law-abiding pro-lifers for peacefully protesting outside abortion centers.
Another bullet point reads: “Provide information to the public about CPCs and take steps to curb their misleading and deceptive practices,” citing as an example a “consumer alert” issued by California.
Pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
The abortion lobby is notoriously hostile to such alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers, to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors, to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
While pro-abortion politicians independently pursued many such policies in anticipation of losing Roe, the Signal notes that the memo “specific actions that matched the subsequent policies of blue states.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison issued a consumer alert against CPCs less than a month after the memo went out; New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin did the same that December.
“Eight days after the memo, Platkin announced a partnership with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New Jersey and issued guidance to state prosecutors for enforcing clinic access laws,” the report notes.
The top cops of Arizona, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania all followed the memo’s advice to issue guidances “clarifying” residents’ remaining legal options; and Arizona, California, New Jersey, and New York all instituted pro-abortion task forces per its instructions.
In April, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) released an extensive report detailing how the nation’s largest abortion chain similarly coordinated with the Biden administration at the federal level, particularly in the targeting of pro-life activists with FACE Act prosecutions.
Thirteen states ban most abortions starting at conception; another five ban it once a fetal heartbeat can be detected (around six weeks), with additional states imposing a range of later restrictions.
But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.