The McIntire Amphitheater was lined with pink crosses October 7 as the Planned Parenthood Project, an organization dedicated to defunding the 98-year-old reproductive health services organization, held an informational session with students about abortion and women’s health. The crosses, totaling 897, were symbolic of the number of abortions that the group claims Planned Parenthood performs every day.
Michele Hendrickson, a regional coordinator for the Planned Parenthood Project and a member of Students for Life of America, explains that the project is traveling around the United States by bus, stopping at college campuses to inform students about the statistics surrounding abortion at Planned Parenthood and to encourage them to choose other healthcare options.
Hendrickson notes that there are “…thousands of federally qualified health centers out there that do not commit abortions. They don’t sell abortions or profit over abortions at all.”
Ann Clare Levy, a second year student at UVA and a member of Hoos for Life, firmly agrees in supporting other healthcare centers, such as the Pregnancy Centers in Charlottesville, calling Planned Parenthood’s treatment of women “misleading.”
“Ninety-four percent of women who go into Planned Parenthood who are pregnant get an abortion,” Levy says, “That’s not a choice to me. That is a very biased push toward abortion and that’s because Planned Parenthood makes a profit off of it.”
Allegations that Planned Parenthood profits off of abortions are unconfirmed, but many anti-abortion advocates note the high cost of abortions as an indicator that abortion is a large source of revenue for the healthcare provider.
A fact sheet on Planned Parenthood’s website tells a different story about the abortion services it provides, stating that abortions account for only three percent of their services. Out of a total of 10.6 million, that amounts to 327,653 abortion procedures a year. However, the organization does not provide information on the total number of pregnant women who seek out services at Planned Parenthood, making it hard to prove or disprove Levy’s statistic. Planned Parenthood did not return multiple phone calls.
Although abortion is a controversial issue, Levy and Hendrickson both report having mostly positive interactions with students, and Levy even calls the students at UVA “a pro-life generation.”
“The conversations have been great,” Hendrickson concurs. “Even when we can agree to disagree on abortion… because it’s really not even about that today. Students are kind of seeing Planned Parenthood in a new light and they’re open to hearing all of these facts about Planned Parenthood.”
Despite Levy and Hendrickson’s positive attitude on the event, third-year student Molly Sall calls the activist group “deceptive,” condemning the facts used by the project.
“I think it’s very unfortunate,” Sall says, “that they’ve taken what are essentially just totally false facts and blown them up on a big banner with a fancy font.”
Sall also expresses confusion over why students at UVA would be affected by the project’s message when college campuses are primarily liberal environments.
“People are just walking by,” she says. “People don’t particularly care. The ratio of work that went into this event versus turnout is pretty dismal and I think that’s a really good indication of how people our age tend to feel about this issue.”