New York - Planned Parenthood, a perennial protest target because of its role in providing abortions, has notified the FBI that at least 12 of its health centres were visited recently by a man purporting to be a sex trafficker but who may instead be part of an attempted ruse to entrap clinic employees.
In each case, according to Planned Parenthood, the man sought to speak privately with a clinic employee and then requested information about health services for sex workers, including some who he said were minors and in the US illegally.
Planned Parenthood's vice-president for communications, Stuart Schear, said the organisation has requested an FBI probe of the man's claims and has already fielded some initial FBI inquiries. However, Schear said Planned Parenthood's own investigation indicates that the man has links with Live Action, an anti-abortion group that has conducted previous undercover projects aimed at discrediting the leading US abortion provider.
Lila Rose, Live Action's founder and president, described Planned Parenthood's assertion as “very interesting”. She declined to confirm or deny that the clinic visits were part of a Live Action operation, but did indicate in a telephone interview that an undercover videotape project of some sort was in the works.
“The story that speaks loudest will be in the evidence,” she said. “I can't comment until we release the visual evidence.”
The visits were made between January 11 and January 15 to health centres in Virginia, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Washington and Arizona. Among them was a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, which Planned Parenthood said was visited on the 15th, a week after the shooting rampage in that city that critically injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
Last week, Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder summarising the visits and requesting an FBI investigation. If the man's assertions were true, she wrote, they would indicate possible violations of federal laws dealing with interstate sex trafficking of minors.
However, Richards said the visits could be part of a hoax resembling some past actions by anti-abortion activists.
“Once inside, these people have recorded ‘undercover' videos of their conversations with our clinic staff and then selectively and maliciously edited the videos,” she wrote. “This may be happening once again. If so, this kind of activity should be firmly condemned.”
Planned Parenthood has been a polarising organisation ever since its precursor, a clinic in Brooklyn, was founded in 1916 by pioneering birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. In recent years, it has been a lightning rod for protests because of its familiar name and two unswerving policies - support for abortion rights and a belief that adolescents, as well as adults, have a right to contraceptives and candid, confidential information about sex.
It operates more than 800 health centres across the US, which offer a range of health and family planning services to about 3 million patients a year. The centres accounted for 324 008 abortions in 2008, about one quarter of the national total.
Justice Department spokeswoman Alisa Finelli, as well as FBI spokesmen in Washington and Arizona, said that under standard policy they could not comment on whether an investigation had in fact been launched. Schear said there had been some preliminary contacts with the FBI, which was asking for information from the clinics that were visited.
According to Schear, the man who visited the clinics initially presented himself as a patient seeking treatment for a sexually transmitted disease, elaborating on the purported sex ring only after getting into a private setting with a staff member. Because of strict patient-privacy laws, Schear said Planned Parenthood could not reveal the man's suspected identity or even describe his looks or apparel.
Schear said the man's image was picked up by video cameras at some of the clinics, and that led to a tentative identification and an apparent link with Live Action. Schear said Planned Parenthood would make the videos available to law enforcement authorities if they made a formal request.
Schear said he and his colleagues found it striking that the clinic in Tucson was among those visited, so soon after the shooting rampage there. “It shows how far some people will go,” he said.
Bryan Howard, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Arizona, said staff at the clinics in Tucson and Scottsdale were in a state of vigilance when the visitor showed up on January 15, because of alerts that had come from affiliates in the East about suspicious visits earlier that week. Also, Arizona clinics had been the target of a Live Action operation in the past.
Howard said his staff at both clinics notified local police.
Lila Rose began infiltrating abortion clinics in 2006. One of her early collaborators was James O'Keefe, who later became famous for wearing a pimp costume in a video that embarrassed the community organising group ACORN.
After forming Live Action, Rose gained prominence with a series of undercover videos in which she posed as a girl in her early teens who'd been impregnated by an older man. The aim was to portray Planned Parenthood staff as willing to ignore laws that required the reporting of cases of suspected statutory rape.
In Indiana, one clinic employee was fired and another resigned after Live Action videos were released.
In December, Live Action announced that it was preparing to launch several major new investigations during 2011 and said it had received a $125 000 gift to finance the operations. It did not identify the source of that gift.
Rose has said her goal is to unnerve Planned Parenthood employees and eventually put them out of business.
“We will work to de-fund them in every state wherever it is possible, to de-license them and to expose them,” she told the conservative Value Voters Summit in October. - Sapa-AP