“We can cover acts of barbarity with a veneer of civility, but we cannot escape our accountability before the creator of life.” “Do you defend the sale of baby body parts?” “We can carve up a child and call it choice.”
These words boomed out from microphones and echoed across the House chamber on September 29, 2015, as Cecile Richards, nearly a decade into her role as president of Planned Parenthood, was testifying in front of the GOP-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Beginning in July 2015, a series of heavily edited, illegally recorded videos had been released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, purporting to show “proof” that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the unlawful sale of fetal tissue. The recordings marked a new chapter of a decades-long, debunked, right-wing conspiracy theory.
The episode also set off a political firestorm with Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists calling on Congress to defund Planned Parenthood, which, like other health-care providers, receives reimbursement for care received by patients covered by Medicaid and through grants such as Title X from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
John Boehner, then speaker of the House, appeared at a press conference saying he’d “vomit” if he tried to discuss the videos and calling for an investigation into Planned Parenthood. Republican presidential candidates, including Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina, weighed in, placing the controversy squarely in the national conversation. As reported by NPR, a number of states launched investigations into whether the “sales” were happening within their borders. No evidence was ever found by Congress or at the state level that Planned Parenthood had violated any laws.
“[2015]...gave anti-abortion figures a really huge national stage,” says Jasmine Geonzon, a researcher at Media Matters for America and an expert on tracking abortion narratives in mainstream and conservative media. “The right really fed into the Center for Medical Progress and…amplified [their message] to people who would never have seen it otherwise.”
Conspiracy theories around abortion have been part of the mainstream political discourse and government policy since the 1970s. While abortion is a safe, routine, health-care procedure that an estimated one in four American women will have in their lifetime, spreading falsehoods about how it works and the providers who make it possible is a means of raising suspicion about and undermining public support for the procedure. The most destructive conspiracies exploit racist and antisemitic tensions. And all of them threaten the safety of doctors, clinic workers, and patients. Experts say that Planned Parenthood’s national footprint has made the organization a particular lightning rod for right-wing conspiracies and disinformation.
Planned Parenthood is “an easy target,” Hayley McMahon, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast (RISE) and a PhD student at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, tells Teen Vogue. “[The anti abortion movement]…brings them up a lot.”
Planned Parenthood remains a key provider of health care and sex education in the US. From 2020 to 2021, the organization provided 8.65 million health services, including abortions, STI tests and treatments, PAP smears, breast exams, and birth control services to 2.16 million patients across the country. “There are real, dangerous consequences to the disinformation spread by those who oppose sexual and reproductive health and rights, especially abortion care,” Melanie Newman, senior vice president of communications and culture at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Teen Vogue via a statement. “Anti-abortion politicians and activists escalate inflammatory claims and champion conspiracy theories in an effort to further their political agenda and control our bodies and lives — with no regard for people’s health and safety.”
Grappling with disinformation around abortion is not unique to Planned Parenthood. McMahon points out there has also been what she calls a historical “overfocus” on Planned Parenthood in the media and by politicians and activists. According to a 2022 report compiled by the Abortion Care Network, Planned Parenthood represents just 24% of all facilities that offer abortion care, while independent clinics provide the majority of abortions in the United States.
But abortion providers of all sizes have had to push back in earnest against disinformation since the Supreme Court ruled that there is a constitutional right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Prominent antifeminist activists like Phyllis Schlafly rallied against the procedure, as did lawmakers at the highest levels of government, including then president Ronald Reagan, who tapped one of the leaders of what became known as the National Right to Life Committee to be deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the center of right-wing myths and conspiracy theories around abortion are baseless, medically inaccurate notions about pain and violence intended to shame patients. From myths about abortion leading to an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility, depression, and suicide, “none of which are remotely true,” says McMahon, abortion is made out to be a dangerous procedure.
Over the years, misinformation has been translated into legal barriers patients must grapple with in order to access care. According to data compiled earlier this year by the Guttmacher Institute, 32 states require a patient to receive counseling before an abortion. Of those states, 30 require a patient to be told the gestational age of the fetus. Twenty-seven states must include information about the so-called risks of abortion. Twelve states require information about the ability of a fetus to feel pain and five states require patients to be told that personhood begins at conception.
In June 2022, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson to overturn Roe and the constitutional right to an abortion, the opinion contained multiple references to false and misleading claims about the procedure. These include the ability of a fetus to feel pain, the “protection of maternal health and safety,” and referred to regulating abortion as being in a state’s interest for the purpose of the “elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures.”
“Language is used to just make abortion seem much more intimidating than it is in reality,” says Geonzon of Media Matters. “The right uses all of this really graphic [medically inaccurate] imagery, whether it's in writing or the posters they bring to protest. They want to make abortion seem extremely graphic and extremely violent.”
Research has proven that both procedural and medication abortions are extremely safe. Studies have shown that abortion is much safer than childbirth and, according to a study by the University of California San Francisco, those denied an abortion were more likely to report certain negative symptoms as well as “poor” or “fair” health five years later than those who received abortion care.
McMahon cautions these myths aren’t just confined to people on the right. Ideas about the safety of abortion and potential health consequences are “deeply entrenched,” she says, even among those who support the procedure. According to a 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 64% of Americans say they believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Yet, McMahon says, “There is a very, very high prevalence of misinformation among people who believe that abortion should be legal and the anti-abortion movement is absolutely strategically manufacturing it.”
During the 2010 midterm elections, a series of billboards went up in Atlanta calling Black children an “endangered species.” The previous year, the anti-abortion Life Institute produced “Maafa-21,” a propaganda film exposing “the secret plan of Black genocide” inherent in the abortion movement. Central to the film’s premise is the work of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and a noted eugenicist, whose beliefs Planned Parenthood has publicly and rigorously disavowed. In the years since the release of those heavily edited videos, the focus on Planned Parenthood hasn’t subsided. Signs reading, “Defund Planned Parenthood,” “Planned Parenthood Lies To You,” or “Planned Parenthood, Go Fund Yourself” can be spotted at anti-abortion protests across the country.
Planned Parenthood’s logo remains prominently displayed on several portions of the home page of the Center for Medical Progress website with links to misleading disinformation about “fetal experimentation” and “fetal trafficking.” STOPP International, a campaign by the American Life League, a Catholic, anti-abortion group based in Virginia, sends subscribers biweekly “reports” advising the things that grassroots anti-abortion activists can do specifically against Planned Parenthood, calling its programs “anti-life” and “anti-family.” In February 2021, right-wing commentator and podcast host Matt Walsh tweeted that Planned Parenthood was the “most racist, violent organization in America.”
Carol Mason, an expert on right-wing movements and a professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Kentucky, points to this kind of agitprop as part of a “divide-and-conquer tactic” adopted by the anti-abortion movement in the wake of Barack Obama's’ election that has helped to give Planned Parenthood the “special status” it holds on the right today. “The anti-abortion effort was to [frame abortion as Black genocide to] really divide the Black vote…and to cause internal strife,” says Mason, “among the Black community that put Obama in office.”
“Every Saturday, I get a lecture about Margaret Sanger,”' says McMahon, who volunteers as a clinic escort at an independent provider. “Every weekend, we have five regular protesters who are all white men and they call Black women, who are coming to a Black-owned clinic, white supremacists for having an abortion. [They tell them] that they're doing the most racist thing they could possibly do by, as they say, ‘killing a Black child.’”
“There’s been a concerted effort to scare the Black community, to divide the Black community, with this wedge issue of abortion," echoes Mason. “If they’re divided, they may not [be a reliably democratic voting bloc].” These efforts appropriate and exploit the very real harm and generational traumas that Black, brown, Indigenous, and Latino communities in the United States have suffered as a result of medical exploitation and racism, including coerced sterilization. McMahon says, “What we're dealing with, at its core, is about Christian fascism and white supremacy.”
Over the past decade, Mason notes she’s seen a right-wing “repackaging” of a decades-old myth pushed by anti-abortion activists of a secret cabal organizing child sacrifices. “To portray individual people deciding to end their pregnancies as a nefarious or organized mass killing of babies is really to feed into and perpetuate…blood libel,” adds Mason. Blood libel is a centuries-old, antisemitic conspiracy theory that accuses Jews of murdering Christian babies and children. “Those tales of Democrats and global elites, which is code for Jews,…you get those takes coming out of Pizzagate and Q-Anon saying these people are conspiring in child sex slavery and human trafficking and child sacrifice,” says Mason. “Those tales caught on because the anti-abortion movement has been promoting that myth for a long time.”
On November 27, 2015, eight weeks after Richards delivered her testimony in front of Congress, a man walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, armed with an assault rifle, killing three people and injuring nine others. Following the attack, the shooter told police he attacked the clinic because he was “upset with them performing abortions and the selling of baby parts.” He later told police he was “happy” with the attack and he dreamed that when he died he would be “met in heaven by unborn fetuses wanting to thank him for saving unborn babies,” as reported by USA Today.
The incident was part of a long history of deadly violence against clinics and doctors who provide abortion care. According to the National Abortion Federation, that number has continued to sharply rise in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. “In the '90s, we saw campaigns to smear doctors who provide abortions as quacks or death peddlers and that they were abortion providers just because they were greedy, unclean, and exploitative,” says Mason. With the 2024 election around the corner, she points to the same tactics being used to promote an “erosion of trust” in experts and institutions as a general trend in current right-wing conspiracies.
“[Today] the smear campaigns aren't just aimed at doctors,” Mason says. “They're aimed at public health officials and civil servants, like poll workers, to erode public trust in individuals and institutions that are devoted to democracy.”
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