Cecile Richards is a woman who is full of ridiculous statements. Her most recent response to a question about Natural Family Planning would definitely fall under that category. This isn’t necessarily surprising, as the President of Planned Parenthood you wouldn’t expect Richards to endorse a method other than abortifacients or abortions themselves.
On Monday, in an interview at the Women in the World Texas Salon with former magazine editor Tina Brown, Cecile Richards criticized natural family planning and instead praised birth control. Richards made false claims about the methods incorporated into Natural Family Planning.
Richards also criticized the Trump administration, accusing the efforts by Congress to defund Planned Parenthood as “going after birth control,” “extraordinary,” and “crazy.”
“We just have seen a leaked memo that basically says that they’re going to try to redirect all the family planning program, where millions of women, how they get access to affordable birth control, to now begin to use it for fertility awareness,” she insisted. “But to really redirect it away from ‘artificial’ family planning to ‘natural’ family planning.”
Brown gasped, “You mean we’re going to go back to the Rhythm method?” and likened the decision to an “episode of Mad Men.”
Richards confirmed, “Yes, back to the Rhythm method.”
“It’s completely insane,” Richards added. “We provide birth control to millions of people every year, and what we usually call folks who come to us who use the Rhythm method, is parents.”
Richards also credited birth control with the lowest teen pregnancy rate since the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. She conveniently forgot to mention that Planned Parenthood’s abortion rates have also spiked dramatically, while seeing a simultaneous decline in actual healthcare services to women. As an example, in it’s latest report, Planned Parenthood performed a dramatic 113 abortions for every adoption referral.
In direct correlation to the rise in abortions performed, Planned Parenthood also saw a huge rise in profit, lining the pockets of their employees and top executives with more than $77 million in profit.
Richards dramatic claims during the interview were factually incorrect. The “leaked memo” that she referred to was never able to be verified by news agencies, and the term it used was “fertility awareness,” never specifically even mentioning anything such as the Rhythm method. Additionally, those familiar with Natural Family Planning are aware that NFP is very different from the Rhythm method, which was a method used during the 1930’s.
To sum it all up, essentially every time Cecile Richards is interviewed she uses extreme hyperbolic statements (at best) or just flat out false statements, engaging in scare tactics to raise more funds for her abortion corporation. Neither Planned Parenthood or Cecile Richards are actually concerned with the health care of women. Their most recently published annual report, testifies to this fact stating that the organization performed 328,348 abortions and received $554.6 million in taxpayer dollars for the year 2015 – 2016.
