Americans United for Life Planned Parenthood Report - July 14, 2011

My name is Renee Ellmers. I represent the second district of North Carolina. Congressman Hultgren and I are co-hosting this special hearing and investigation into this. We want to talk to you about it. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, which receives more than a million dollars a day of taxpayer funds. The issue today is, "Should American taxpayer dollars be going to pay for abortion?" Overwhelmingly we’ve heard from the American people that they don’t want to see their funds going that way, regardless of how you feel about that particular issue. The money can be much better spent elsewhere, especially today at this time here in Washington when we are having so many issues that we are dealing with…With trying to grapple with the debt that we have created, the spending problem that we have. We’re talking about again taxpayer funds going for this act, and we feel very strongly that it’s time to put an end to it so that taxpayer dollars can go to more effective programs. You will hear from a number of my colleagues who are here today, as well as from Americans United for Life President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest, whose organization produced this ground-breaking report. The report details some very troubling news of systemic financial irregularities within Planned Parenthood, and which I believe lays the foundation for further inquiry. Now I just want to tell you a little bit about how we’re going to do this event today. Please, if you can, hold your questions until the end after each of the speakers here today have spoken. I will introduce the speakers and then we will have a Q&A time. I will ask the reporters to please identify yourself, your name, and the organization that you are with. Dr. Yoest is going to be explaining some of the different specifics in this troubling investigation that has been unveiled. I just want to point out a few that jumped out at me. Planned Parenthood plays games with numbers: in terms of time, money, and unduplicated clients. Abortion means far more to Planned Parenthood than the 3 percent services which they have claimed in the past is the percentage of abortions that they do. Planned Parenthood documents acknowledge that the providing of abortion services is actually 12 percent of the patients that they see. Along the lines again of the federal funding Planned Parenthoods 2008-2009 annual report states they received 363 million dollars in federal and state government grants and contracts. But it has doubled since 1998. That number has doubled. As government funding of Planned Parenthood has doubled, Planned Parenthood has doubled its abortions. So you see the dollars and the numbers line up. I just want to take a moment right now to introduce Congressman Hultgren, who has a few words to say as well.

Speech from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh_EmXkaoMM&list=UUHlEm6WDK8UWn5STL_fZm_g.