OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – A pro-life activist who exposed an abortion clinic here for trafficking in aborted baby body parts 15 years ago has a piece of advice for those who want to defund Planned Parenthood: Keep the scandal in front of the world’s eyes by using social media.
In 2000, Mark Crutcher released a report, providing evidence that the Planned Parenthood clinic in Overland Park, Kansas, was trafficking in aborted baby body parts. Today, nearly half of the Missouri women who get abortions do so out of state—many of them at the Overland Park clinic.
Although Crutcher’s report received some attention on prominent news agencies 15 years ago, many media agencies ignored the story.
But, according to Crutcher, the liberal media is struggling to bury the more recent exposure of Planned Parenthood by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), which has released five incriminating videos about the abortion giant since mid-July. Crutcher says that one reality helps to explain this fact: Pro-lifers are using Facebook and Twitter, a tool they didn’t have 15 years ago.
“Social media is what is driving this,” said Crutcher, who is founder of the Texas-based pro-life organization, Life Dynamics. “Social media has forced the media’s hand. They can’t ignore stuff like they used to.”
According to the Washington Times, the conservative Center for Media Research reported that ABC, CBS and NBC had spent merely 20 minutes covering the CMP’s five investigative videos during a three week period—nearly four times less than their coverage of the shooting death of Cecil the African lion. In contrast, according to Baptist Press, the hashtag #PlannedParenthood was among the nation’s top three trending items on social media nationally on the day that the first CMP video was released, with 57,000 tweets using the hashtag.