You couldn’t pick up a newspaper, channel surf television, or visit social media sites without tripping over the latest Planned Parenthood scandal this past week.
In clandestine videos, you saw Planned Parenthood officials haggling over fetal organs and suggesting to ask their surgeons to use procedures that were “less crunchy” in order to keep the child’s body “intact.” They are procedures, they admit, that violate their patient agreements, but at the right price their organization’s objections could be dropped.
From the sidelines, crisis communication specialists observed how this multimillion-dollar, 100-year-old organization with millions of supporters and tremendous political clout would handle its publicity crisis.
After watching Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, sit-down interview onABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and reading the news coverage that followed, the organization went with what seemed to be a conscious decision to ignore the content of the videos and focus instead the videos’ creator – Center for Medical Progress (CMP). It was a shoot-the-messenger approach destined to fail.
This type of response will only prolong the controversy, because it fails to focus on the critical issue of trust. Its failure will grow to intolerable hypocrisy when CMP releases its additional dozen or so additional Planned Parenthood videos.
Setting aside any political, religious or personal viewpoints on abortion, this blossoming controversy is severely damaging Planned Parenthood’s image and work because the videos’ content raises the question of whether the patient-doctor relationship is based on trust or money.
For more than 98 years, Planned Parenthood had billed itself as a health center in underserved communities and as a place of last resort for unintended pregnancies. The degree of confidentiality and trust between the organization and its patients is critical to its core mission.
Rather than take time during ABC’s internationally televised news program to reassure its patients and begin rebuilding trust with the general public, Richards spent the majority of the interview calling CMP a group of “militant anti-abortion activists,” that used “very highly edited videos, sensationalized videos to try to impugn and smear the name of Planned Parenthood.”
Yes, the summary videos are highly edited but as George Stephanopoulos and others including CMP noted, full and unedited videos were simultaneously made public on online.
In addition, even if CMP is a pro-life biased group of “militant anti-abortion activists,” that charge doesn’t get to the heart of questions about why Planned Parenthood officials seemed to be haggling over fetal organs and waiving doctor-patient protections.
The CMP videos bring up ethical and health questions. By suggesting modified medical procedures that enable the sale of intact fetal organs without the patient’s knowledge or consent, Planned Parenthood stands in violation of the trust of their patients, the general community, their financial supporters and those who support and advocate for their cause.
Simply reprimanding the Planned Parenthood officials in the videos is not enough. Planned Parenthood needs to fire their responsible personnel and distance themselves from their viewpoints, publicly.
It must also publicly and privately reassure its patients that their safety and health is paramount to the organization. It should suspend its fetal organ program until a new set of guidelines and procedures compliant with the law can be established.
Finally, it requires entirely new ethical guidelines that bind its employees to prevent such events from every occurring again.
Planned Parenthood can’t just go out and attack the messenger by calling the group radical and extremist anti-abortionists. The clear, white light of truth shown in the videos makes such a response look self-serving and irresponsible. They need to tackle their greatest vulnerability straight on: Planned Parenthood’s officials’ willingness to violate ironclad patient agreements in exchange for a favorable fetal organ price and the revenue it delivers to those in charge.
Hector Barajas is a partner with RCI Public Affairs. With decades as a political insider and expert in policy strategy, his views are shared on all media platforms and as an on-air analyst for Univision and Telemundo. In 2012, the Hearst Corporation recognized Hector as one of the 20 Latino Political Stars nationwide. In 2014, Campaigns and Elections magazine named him one of the Top 50 Influencers in the United States.