By Jim Sedlak
Breaking news this month was the announcement by Planned Parenthood Federation of America that it has selected its new president. The new president, who will officially start on November 12, 2018, is Dr. Leana Wen. Dr. Wen is currently the commissioner of health in Baltimore, Maryland. For years, we pointed out that Planned Parenthood proclaims itself as a healthcare organization, but that it had a political strategist with no medical experience (Cecile Richards) as its president. This must have hit a nerve or two at Planned Parenthood.
The first line of the official announcement on Planned Parenthood’s website read, “For the first time in nearly 50 years, a doctor will lead Planned Parenthood Federation of America.” The other doctor was, of course, Dr. Alan Guttmacher, who was the second major president of Planned Parenthood. Dr. Guttmacher was not into providing health services but focused on population control. In fact, during his time running the organization, its name was changed to Planned Parenthood—World Population. To understand the devastating worldwide effects of population control, we recommend you view this new short video by Mercedes Wilson, president of the Families of the Americas Foundation.
Although Guttmacher was the last doctor to lead Planned Parenthood, he was not the last medical professional. In 1993, after the election of Bill Clinton as president of the United States, Planned Parenthood brought in Pamela Maraldo, a nurse and head of the National League for Nursing, to “reinvent” the organization. Maraldo had first turned down the job, but after Clinton was elected and it was thought the nation would move to national healthcare, Planned Parenthood wanted her expertise to make it part of that healthcare.
Maraldo was given the job of moving Planned Parenthood from its traditional sex, birth control, and abortion advocacy into the mainstream of healthcare. She worked with the heads of some of Planned Parenthood’s largest affiliates (at the time, Planned Parenthood had a total of 168 affiliates in the country) to put together a “reinvention” plan to do just that. The plan ran into major obstacles—especially among the smaller affiliates. The internal fight, plus the fact that Clinton’s healthcare plan was rejected by Congress, led to the PPFA board giving a “no confidence” vote for Maraldo in early 1995. She resigned and Planned Parenthood resumed its historic way of operating.
The experience, however, changed Planned Parenthood’s view of how it wanted to be structured. It set about a deliberate plan to rid itself of smaller affiliates, or, at least, to merge small affiliates together and into larger affiliates, with an ultimate goal of having a smaller number of affiliates, each having an income of at least $5 million. Now, in 2018, Planned Parenthood has trimmed down to just 52 affiliates and most have surpassed the $5 million objective.
So, now, we have this next doctor as head of Planned Parenthood. An immediate observation is that Dr. Wen’s philosophies don’t seem to gel with Planned Parenthood’s. Dr. Wen’s primary interest is in “patient-centered care.” As a patient advocate, she wrote a critically acclaimed book entitled When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests. In addition, she’s given a number of TED talks. Her TED talk on transparency in medicine has been viewed over 1.8 million times. The fact that Planned Parenthood failed to mention any of this in its announcement of her upcoming presidency should be a warning sign for her.
Dr. Wen has said that, when she was a young girl in Los Angeles, she and her mother were patients at the local Planned Parenthood. She says her experience there was a good one. She obviously thinks of Planned Parenthood as a good organization based on that personal experience some 20 years ago. But her experience is not the normal one.
As Dr. Wen takes over the reins of the organization in November, she is going to learn the real motivations behind Planned Parenthood. Although she may think it is patient-centered care, she will quickly find it is free sex, population control, eugenics, and money. In her TED talk, Wen pushed the idea of doctors telling their patients about the money they get from drug companies and other sources. She may find real resistance inside PP if the centers run by PP have to tell patients that they pay less than $2 for the birth control pills for which it is charging the patient $18 (or more). How about telling the patients that PP’s birth control products cause a suppression of the patient’s immune system and makes them more susceptible to viruses?
In 2016, NPR in Baltimore ran a profile piece on Dr. Wen. It said, in part,
Trained in emergency medicine, Wen, 33, says running the health department in Baltimore is the fastest-paced job she’s had.
She sees herself as the city’s doctor. Each overdose death weighs on her. “It’s so real for me every day,” Wen says. These drug-related deaths are preventable. “And when we don’t do something about it or we don’t do enough, we see the consequence of somebody dying,” she says. “That is really immediate.”
If each drug overdose death in Baltimore weighed on her, can you imagine how the 880 deaths by surgical and medical abortion every day at Planned Parenthood facilities will affect her? Her only recourse will be to deny that aborted babies are human beings. But that would certainly be hard to do by a woman doctor of her intelligence.
Back in the 90s, when Wen’s family was just settling in California after fleeing China, Pamela Maraldo knew the history of the organization, tried to change it, and quickly left. We hope that when Dr. Wen realizes the true nature of the organization, she will not compromise her compassion for patients that she showed in the ER the day of the Boston marathon bombings. We hope she will stay true to her TED talk and her book. To do that, she will have to make an early exit from Planned Parenthood, as Maraldo did.
We pray for Dr. Wen as she is about to enter the devil’s lair.
Jim Sedlak is executive director of American Life League, founder of STOPP International, and host of a live weekly radio talk show on the Radio Maria Network. He has been successfully fighting Planned Parenthood since 1985.