With the fate of the last Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Missouri hanging in the balance, some in the media have resorted to spreading misinformation in order to draw attention away from the facility's numerous health and safety violations.

Planned Parenthood has accused the state of Missouri of politically targeting abortion, framing the potential clinic closure as an attempt to limit reproductive health services. Their hope is that the public will forget about the clinic’s multiple botched abortions and dangerous, unsanitary conditions that may soon culminate in the final revocation of its license.

The latest piece of propaganda has emerged as the abortion provider battles the St. Louis Circuit Court to preserve its license, claiming that the state is attempting to “intimidate” them with interviews about patient complaints. But this is not the only lie Planned Parenthood has helped spread. Their latest smear of a Missouri state health director is clearly an attempt to cover up their clinic’s unethical conduct.

As hearings related to the lawsuit commenced, numerous misleading headlines emerged, accusing state health director Dr. Randall Williams of tracking the periods of Planned Parenthood patients. The claim was that the state was fixating on the last menstrual periods of the women who visited the Missouri abortion clinic, heavily implying that the information was being used for some perverted purpose. But the state health director merely pulled the medical records of patients as he investigated Planned Parenthood, and the spreadsheet containing abortion patient information also included records of gestational ages and abortion procedure dates.

The LMP dates were just one of many terms on a spreadsheet that didn't even include patients' names. The media’s claim that the government is controlling women through “period-tracking” paints an incredibly dishonest picture of the situation. As health department spokeswoman Lisa Cox explained, the LMP data were merely cross-referenced with abortion dates in order to obtain an accurate count of the number of abortions the clinic had performed. The data was also pulled from information Planned Parenthood had already provided, so it wasn't as if this was newly sought out.

Moreover, the information that state officials reviewed helped them discover that at least four patients had returned to the facility on multiple occasions to complete the same surgical abortion.

A department investigator found that there had been “approximately 3,000 abortions conducted in 2018," and "67 instances where the same woman had multiple abortions in the same year. The data was further narrowed" through the use of LMP data "to exclude multiple abortions and ultimately identified a case where a failed abortion was not reported by Planned Parenthood, in violation of Missouri Law.”

There were no HIPPA violations involved here. Williams had not carried around or released a spreadsheet of patient records, nor did he even see the record in question until his deposition on Oct. 17. Regulators acted within their rights to secure the safety of patients at facilities, as a long-standing legal mandate requires “an individual abortion report for each abortion performed or induced upon a woman shall be completed by the physician who performed or induced the abortion.”

By law, there must be a review of reports from abortion facilities in order to ensure a certain standard of care is being met. Since Planned Parenthood had been refusing to comply with complication reporting requirements for failed abortions, the resulting investigation was motivated by regulators realizing they needed to protect the health and safety of Planned Parenthood clients.

Unfortunately, it seems that the abortion provider has not extended this same level of dedication to its patients. The Missouri Planned Parenthood clinic’s poor treatment of clients has led to more than 70 women being injured, and over 62 pages worth of health code violations. A decision regarding the fate of the St. Louis abortion facility is not expected until February. The situation regarding the sole abortion provider in Missouri does raise the question about what the goal of legal abortion is supposed to be. If it’s meant to be “safe,” then why is it that such a dangerous Planned Parenthood center has been allowed to remain open for so long?

Samantha Kamman writes on abortion for Lone Conservative.com