Pro-Abortion Urban Legend Busted

There’s been a rumor going around the net, starting from Planned Parenthood about a crisis pregnancy center that went too far:

An Indiana mother recently accompanied her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend to one of Indiana’s Planned Parenthood clinics, but they unwittingly walked into a “crisis pregnancy center” run by an anti-abortion group — one that shared a parking lot with the real Planned Parenthood clinic, and was designed expressly to lure Planned Parenthood patients and deceive them.

The group took down the girl’s confidential personal information and told her to come back for her appointment, which they said would be in their “other office” (the real Planned Parenthood office nearby). When she arrived for her appointment, not only did the Planned Parenthood staff have no record of her, but the police were there — the “crisis pregnancy center” had called them, claiming that a minor was being forced to have an abortion against her will.

The “crisis pregnancy center” staff then proceeded to wage a campaign of intimidation and harassment over the following days, showing up at the girl’s home and calling her father’s workplace. Our clinic director reports that she was “scared to death to leave her house.” They even went to her school and urged classmates to pressure her not to have an abortion.

John Jansen questioned the school part:

They went to her school? One wonders how they would have done this. It’s next to impossible for a stranger to enter a school building, as nearly all schools’ doors are locked from the outside.

Perhaps “They even went to her school…” means that the CPC workers waited outside the school for the girl to leave at the end of the school day.

But how could they have known who this girl’s “classmates” were? Or did they just go up to students at random (who, for all the CPC workers knew, didn’t even know who this girl was) and “pressure” them to tell her not to have an abortion?

It put a red flag on it, but that logical flaw wasn’t convincing enough for one liberal commenter who wrote:

The best way to debunk a story is to prove it wrong. Prove that they didnt and I’ll listen.

Today John lowered the boom with some great detective work. The story’s greatest challenge is that it had some specific facts. This happened at an abortion clinic in Indiana which shared a parking lot with a crisis pregnancy center. There was only one Planned Parenthood Clinic that fit that description, the one in Indianapolis:

It occurred to me today that if, in fact, the Indianapolis Police had shown up at the Planned Parenthood acting on a tip that a girl was being forced to have an abortion, they obviously would have filed a police report.

Since police reports are matters of public record, I called the Indianapolis Police Department to find out if there was any police report that would corroborate Planned Parenthood’s version of events.

The woman I spoke with at IPD did a search and came up with: nothing.

I also asked her to do a search on the crisis pregnancy center. Again: nothing.

Further searches of court records showed nothing. Absolutely no evidence to corroborate this wild story. No apologies yet, no eggs on the face yet, but hats off to John for showing the tenacity to find the truth. Now, to wait for the apology from Planned Parenthood for creating this myth to protect their industry. I won’t hold my breath.

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