Planned Parenthood to Retrain Public Staff

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Source: The New York Times

Reacting to the release of videotapes in which its staff members advise an apparent sex trafficker, Planned Parenthood said Monday that it would retrain thousands of staff members across the country on its rules for reporting possible dangers to minors, and would automatically fire anyone who violated them.

All employees who have contact with the public will attend special training sessions, tailored to local laws, in coming weeks, said Stuart Schear, vice president for communications of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“We’re doing this to reassure the public that we take these reporting requirements seriously,” Mr. Schear said.

With the announcement, Planned Parenthood hoped to blunt the public impact of what it called a misleading string of covertly taped videos being released by Live Action, an anti-abortion group. On the videotapes, Planned Parenthood employees are heard telling a man who says he runs a “sex business” how to get medical care and abortions for under-age prostitutes.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/us/08parenthood.html

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Speaking of the NYT, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has a blog entry analyzing how that newspaper and the Washington Post approached the conservative covert videos stories (ACORN, PP).

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1. Conservative undercover hoaxes are an attempt to make their fantasies real...

It didn't really work, because Planned Parenthood quickly caught on and alerted the FBI. (BigJournalism.com exclusive: Planned Parenthood alerts the authorities when confronted by self-proclaimed human traffickers!) Planned Parenthood suspected that the hoaxer had ties to Live Action, an antiabortion activist group run by Lila Rose, a sometime O'Keefe partner-in-undercover-stinging. And Live Action confirmed its involvement by posting the sad results of its exhaustive video investigation today. It caught one staffer possibly advising a make-believe pimp to send a make-believe underage prostitute somewhere where her abortion would not be reported. (It is obviously impossible to tell what actually happened without the unedited video.) (And also this Planned Parenthood alerted the authorities about the weird visit.)

These conservative undercover "hoaxes" are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at [e-mail] and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

http://www.salon.com/news/abortion/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/01/planned_parenthood_sting