Planned Parenthood Secretly Buys Land for New Offices
By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor
August 24, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - The nation's biggest abortion provider is seeking to avoid opposition when buying property or building new facilities through secrecy, or what one pro-life leader called "a series of cover-ups" in such places as Denver, Colo., Portland, Ore., and Aurora, Ill.

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) - a division of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America - announced this week it will break ground in November on a $4.2 million headquarters and clinic on northwest Denver property it bought secretly last year.

Planned Parenthood, which receives $305.3 million in tax dollars a year, is the largest abortion chain in the United States and has killed more than 3 million children by abortion, according to the American Life League.

PPRM Senior Vice President Leslie Durgin told the Denver Post that the organization initially intended to complete the entire project in secrecy to avoid the kind of protests and delays Planned Parenthood building projects have encountered elsewhere.

But when a reporter discovered that the group had bought an entire city block under a different name, the organization acknowledged that ground would be broken for its new 50,000-square-foot, three-story center in November and that the facility was slated to begin operation in August 2008.

PPRM moved to its current Denver location, a former bank, in 1973, Durgin said. Twenty-three years later, it added a second location for administrative offices.

"We really wanted to build a state-of-the-art health-care facility and to consolidate our programs and services. To do that in the current facilities was not realistic," she said, adding that the new structure would be the first new clinic the 90-year-old organization has built in the Denver area.

Leslie Hanks, vice president of Colorado Right to Life, told Cybercast News Service on Thursday that her organization has begun making plans to launch protests and initiate boycotts when construction on the new structure begins.

"We have a strong presence at their current 'death camp,' where we save about 100 babies a year," she said. "Every day they kill, protesters are there, and we don't intend to go away anytime soon."

Hanks said she suspected PPRM might be looking to move to another location since "they've really let that facility go down the tubes. It's all sprayed with graffiti, and they haven't tried to clean it up or anything."

Over the next few months, pro-life forces "intend to try to get more 'troops' and step up our pressure and efforts to expose the lies Planned Parenthood tells," Hanks added, "such as denying that they target minorities."

"Every day in this country, 1,600 black babies die at the hands of abortionists, and they tend to put their centers right in the heart of minority neighborhoods," Hanks said. "And this new facility is no exception," because it's to be built in an area with more minority residents than the current structures.

"Let's face it," she added, Planned Parenthood is "in the business to kill babies for profit."

However, Durgin responded that African-American women received only 7 percent of the abortions it provided in 2006, compared with 55.5 percent for white women, and PPRM served 125,000 people in five states last year. Of those, 8,800 African-American women received abortions.

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America last year experienced a drop in donations and the first fall in income from clinics in its history.

Jim Sedlak, executive director of Stop Planned Parenthood (STOPP) International, said he believes those factors have led the PPFA and its affiliates to engage in what he called "a series of cover-ups" across the country.

"This is now the third major facility that they've tried to build secretly," Sedlak told Cybercast News Service on Thursday. Besides Denver, "one was in Portland, Ore., where they tried to go through a front organization to buy the land from the city and build" until the ruse was discovered.

And in Aurora, Ill., a 22,000-square-foot structure was built under a fake name, he said.

"The sign out front said 'Gemini Health Systems,'" Sedlak said. "It was only about a month ago that one of the workers got suspicious when he saw they were installing bullet-proof glass. He started raising questions, which got to local reporters, and the reporters found out that it's a Planned Parenthood facility" set to open Sept. 18.

"Planned Parenthood has such a bad name that they can't even tell people when they're planning to build a building," he said. "They have to sneak into a community."

As a result, STOPP is warning people across the nation that "if you have a major new health facility in your area at all, suspect it may be Planned Parenthood and go find out about it," said Sedlak.

Back in Denver, the PPRM work site will be fenced, and protesters will not be allowed inside the boundaries of private property, Durgin said. "We don't expect to have a police presence on a daily basis unless we need it," she said, "in which case we'll call for it, and I have been assured we will get it."

Sedlak responded that the police in Denver have been occupied, though not quite in the way Durgin thought they would be.

"There have been two arrests out there, but they were local people who were harassing the protestors," he said.



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