President Obama stood firm on his support for Planned Parenthood during Tuesday's debate with Mitt Romney. But two prominent pro-life leaders state the president also perpetuated a lie regarding the abortion agency's services.
Barack Obama needs to check his facts concerning statements he made about Planned Parenthood last night. That's the advice of spokespersons for both American Life League and the National Right to Life Committee. Paul Rondeau, executive director of American Life League, tells OneNewsNow that in pressing for the need for continuing taxpayer support of Planned Parenthood, Obama repeated a mistake by saying that the abortion giant offers mammograms.
"Either he's ignorant of a group that has spent $5 million to re-elect him; or he's incompetent, and the voters can decide that; or as we say in DC, he's dissembling or he's inaccurate or misstating or misleading or confabulating," he offers. "But to us common folk in the flyover states we would just call that lying."
Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life Committee, agrees with Rondeau's assessment. "... Planned Parenthood has been found out through a lot of investigation that they do not do mammograms -- and they have started admitting it," she says. "But he continued to put forth that lie as a defense for why he wants to keep giving our tax dollars to the abortion providers."
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The president also stressed support for the Health and Human Services mandate to require free coverage for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilizations. Rondeau passes along this information: "Inside of that mandate is a billion dollar superfund for elective abortions," he says. "There's also a $75 million set-aside which basically puts Planned Parenthood into schools to teach children about sex and to counsel them without parental notification."
Tobias also took issue with Obama's discussion about the controversial mandate. "When he talked about how he wanted his two daughters to have the same opportunities as anybody's sons have, he brought Planned Parenthood up and the need for funding of Planned Parenthood in just really strange ways," she observes. "That was the top thing on his mind last night."
Rondeau concludes Obama "cannot be trusted or believed" when it comes to anything he says about Planned Parenthood. "He is so deep in their pocket it is scary," he comments, "and [that] should be very worrisome to the American taxpayer and the American voter of any stripe."
Alliance Defending Freedom has called on the president to correct the record and explain that Planned Parenthood does not offer mammograms. "If Planned Parenthood is operating mammogram machines without a license, it is violating federal law," says ADF attorney Casey Mattox. "His own administration has confirmed that Planned Parenthood has no such licenses.
"No one should prop up an abortion business by claiming it is helping women in ways that it does not," concludes Mattox.
Planned Parenthood has a budget of over a billion dollars a year. More than half of that comes from federal, state, and local tax dollars.