This is like that Acorn story, where a conservative filmmaker went around trying to catch Acorn employees doing something that is against the law. It worked so well (Acorn is dead) that the same tactic is used against Planned Parenthood clinics.
Some background from January:
In the course of five days this month, eight Planned Parenthood clinics in five states and D.C. reported getting the same visit: A man said he needed treatment for a sexually transmitted disease and then, once alone with a staff member, implied that he ran an interstate sex trafficking ring that involves minors and illegal immigrants.I have been told that the number of clinics contacted was at least twelve. In one of those twelve the people posing as a pimp and a prostitute hit gold:
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America thinks that the visits, which happened between Jan. 11 and 15, are part of a James O'Keefe-style "sting." But the group called in the FBI anyway.
"These multi-state visits from men claiming to be engaged in sex trafficking of minors may be a hoax," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last week. "However, if the representations made by this man are true," she wrote, they indicate violations of several sex trafficking, prostitution and child sex laws.
The man and woman walked into the Planned Parenthood clinic in Perth Amboy sounding like the operators of a child sex ring looking for help with their business.You can watch the (supposedly) unedited video here. In it the office manager pretty clearly stated that what she proposed would not pass muster at the clinic in general. Whatever her motives may have been, her opinions were not those of the Planned Parenthood Clinic at which she worked.
They told the manager they would bring in girls as young as 14 for tests, birth control and abortion referrals and wanted to know what kind of questions to expect from clinic employees.
The manager was helpful. She coached them to lie about the age of the girls’ sex partners. "If they are a minor, we are obligated if we hear certain information, to kind of report (it)," the manager said. "So as long as they just lie and say, ‘Oh, he’s 15, 16,’ ’’ no one should question them.
But the man and woman were actually members of Live Action, a California-based anti-abortion group that targeted Planned Parenthood clinics in five states and Washington, D.C., last month. The scenes were videotaped and posted on YouTube, and Tuesday created a national uproar.
Tuesday night, Central Jersey Planned Parenthood fired the manager, identified in the video as Amy Woodruff, and beefed up security around its clinics.
The video was not created in order to protect girls and women who are trafficked but in order to kill general access to abortions (the way Acorn was killed). It's important to keep that in mind. Combating trafficking requires -- well --- combating trafficking, not making birth control and STD tests too expensive for most poor women to afford. And that is what the death of subsidized clinics would mean.
This is not a fun post to write both because the office manager acted like an asshat and because the mean Echidne rears her head and keeps proposing a guerrilla group of people from our side going after all the conservative organizations and getting their employees say really bad things which can then be put on YouTube as final and decisive evidence of something or other. It's so easy to slide past all the evidence which points in the other direction as long as you have the footage! Never mind that the phishing expedition went on quite a while, never mind that the FBI was contacted. I guess that's why I want to turn the tables.