Power

Jeb Bush Visits Crisis Pregnancy Center, Calls for Planned Parenthood Investigation

Jeb Bush has bragged that Florida is “the only state, I believe, to have funded with state monies crisis pregnancy centers.” He’s wrong about that.

Jeb Bush has bragged that Florida is “the only state, I believe, to have funded with state monies crisis pregnancy centers.” He’s wrong about that. Andrew Cline / Shutterstock.com

See more of our coverage on the misleading Center for Medical Progress videos here.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made a campaign stop at a South Carolina crisis pregnancy center on Wednesday, telling a group of anti-choice supporters there that Congress should investigate Planned Parenthood’s tissue donation program.

GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates have called for investigations into the health-care organization after an anti-choice organization released a heavily edited attack video in which a Planned Parenthood official discusses the organization’s policy of fetal tissue donation for medical research.

Though fetal tissue donation is legal, and the Planned Parenthood official explains that what they do is on a donation basis, conservative policymakers have jumped on the video—edited from over two hours of footage down to less than ten minutes—as evidence of fetal tissue “trafficking” by Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood has refuted those claims, and a spokesperson for the organization said the video is “part of a decade-long campaign of deceiving the public, making false charges and terrorizing women and their doctors.”

Speaking about the video, Bush said “it troubles me that you would sell body parts,” according to a reporter with him on his campaign. “It just makes no sense to me.”

Bush made those comments at the Carolina Pregnancy Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina. CPCs like the Carolina Pregnancy Center advocate for women not to have abortions, often misleading women or providing them with inaccurate information to achieve that goal. A recent study by NARAL Pro-Choice California found that the CPCs regularly tell clients that getting an abortion will make them infertile and lead to breast cancer and depression.

One CPC employee mentioned in NARAL’s California report mistook an investigator’s intrauterine device (IUD) for a fetus during an ultrasound, telling the investigator that it was “her baby.”

CPC workers, according to the report, tell women that going through with an induced abortion is unnecessary, because the chance of a spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage, is 30-50 percent.

Jeb Bush this year bragged that Florida is “the only state, I believe, to have funded with state monies crisis pregnancy centers.”

He’s wrong about that: At least 11 states have given taxpayer money directly to CPCs. Many other states have passed legislation funneling money into CPCs through the sale of “Choose Life” license plates.