Jindal wisely keeps tax dollars from corrupt group

It might have seemed premature at the time, but Gov. Bobby Jindal either had advance notice or superior intuition when he correctly cancelled Louisiana’s service provision contract with Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Inc., for reasons now so obvious.

When the Center for Medical Progress began to release video recordings of employees and officials of Planned Parenthood’s national organization and its regional affiliates discussing pricing for human body parts and ability to change procedures to best obtain these – both selling parts and altering abortion methods to harvest these are illegal under federal law – Jindal ordered an inquiry into PPGC operations to see if it engaged in such activities. PPGC is the Texas-based affiliate that oversees the organization’s two clinics in Louisiana, of which neither performs abortions (it does in Texas). The information came back from the head of PPGC attesting the group did none of that.

Yet within days a released video featured another PPGC official admitting it would alter procedures in order to harvest parts for sale, directly contradicting the assertions in the reply back to Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals. But the day before Jindal already had instructed DHH to cancel the contract, which can be done at will with 30 days’ notice by either party. The nearly $300,000 payment – about 1 percent of its revenues – was to cover other health services.

Previous to the video’s appearance, Jindal’s move might have appeared too drastic. While the majority of Planned Parenthood’s revenues come from abortions, the majority of its discrete units of services delivered concern other areas of women’s health. And given that abortions were not being performed in Louisiana (even as it plans to petition the state to open an abortion mill in New Orleans), to yank the contract would disrupt provision of these services in the short term.

Yet the video that followed shortly thereafter presents all the justification necessary and then some. Simply, it shows PPGC as a mendacious organization unscrupulously violating the law. Outside of those enthralled entirely in thanatological ideology that permits no criticism of the likes of Planned Parenthood, any objective viewer of these videos will conclude its mandarins lie when they makes claims to the contrary. And there appears no more boldfaced tissue of lies than those made on paper by the PPGC head. A criminal investigation has been launched on the matter in Texas.

This organization has no credibility, and on principle it’s a bad deal for taxpayers to trust their monies to a group corrupt enough to mislead the people. Awarding the contract to other providers and not to PPGC is the right move.