Planned Parenthood lied about training employees to identify child sex traffickers, says former manager

A Planned Parenthood facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. | Wikimedia Commons/Fibonacci Blue

A new investigation has revealed that Planned Parenthood has failed to fulfill its promise to train its employees to identify child sex traffickers.

In 2011, undercover journalists posing as pimps went to Planned Parenthood to find out how the employees would react to sex traffickers seeking its services, including abortions. The videos resulting from the investigation by pro-life group Live Action showed that the employees from seven different facilities were willing to help sex traffickers cover up abuses of young girls.

Following the release of the videos, Planned Parenthood said that it was retraining thousands of its staff to identify child sex traffickers. However, a follow-up investigation by Live Action revealed that the abortion chain trained its staff to identify undercover journalists instead.

Former Planned Parenthood manager Ramona Trevino said that she initially believed that the abortion organization was willing to fix the problem. However, her views quickly changed after she attended a manager training meeting.

She narrated that she became perplexed when the Planned Parenthood speaker played the previous undercover videos about the abortion chain.

"As time went on, I raised my hand and said, 'I'm confused. When are we going to actually begin the retraining? What can I do as a manager to take this information back to my staff and enforce policies and procedures that would help protect women?' [The Planned Parenthood speaker] immediately shot me down," Trevino told Live Action.

She said that the presenter told her, "We are not here to talk about that, Ramona. We are here to teach you how to identify if you're being videotaped, or recorded, or entrapped in any way."

Planned Parenthood also claimed that it had reported the suspected sex traffickers. But the public documents obtained by Live Action revealed that only Arizona, out of five states visited by the undercover investigators, had records showing Planned Parenthood reported anything to authorities.

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards sent a letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder regarding the sex trafficking scandal. However, the letter failed to correctly identify all the states visited by the investigators posing as sex traffickers.

The letter also claimed that the employees "made it clear" to the traffickers that they would comply with the law and report them to law enforcement. But Live Action pointed out that the employees never made such a statement to the investigators in the video.

Trevino said she was "so disgusted" because Planned Parenthood responded to the scandal by teaching its employees to watch out for investigators and whistleblowers. "I couldn't see how Planned Parenthood could ever redeem themselves after that," she remarked.