The video has made social media waves, generating more than 7 million views in its first 24 hours.
Yesterday, Planned Parenthood responded. In this article in the New York Times, a PP official says that the videos are part of an effort to smear Planned Parenthood, noting that they have never claimed that all of their affiliates or all of their offices offer prenatal services.
With this in mind, we thought we would take a look at our local Planned Parenthood affiliates' offices with respect to prenatal care. We selected two clinics - the Delaware, OH, and OSU Campus-area clinics. Indeed, a visit to these websites yields no claims of offering prenatal services, instead noting that they refer pregnant patients who wish to continue their pregnancies to other providers. That isn't the end of the story, though. You see, we distinctly rememberd a previous version of the website claiming to offer both pre-natal and fertility care. So, we used the very handy "Internet Wayback Machine" to check the history of the website, and what we found is quite interesting. If you've never heard of the "wayback machine" it is an archival service that stores archived versions of websites. While it does not capture every detail (such as when exactly a webpage was updated), it does show snapshots of a page's past on specific dates.
If you visit the Planned Parenthood campus and Delaware, Ohio, office online today, you see no reference to offering prenatal care, but if you look at the archived websites from December of 2016, both claim to offer prenatal and fertility help.
Conclusion? At some point between December 2, 2016, and today, the websites were changed to scrub away any reference to Planned Parenthood providing prenatal care and a note added that the clinics refer to prenatal help. We don't know exactly when that happened, but it seems pretty likely that they scrubbed their websites in response to this most recent scandalous expose.
What do you think? Coincidence?