In April of this year, Idaho joined twelve other states in passing strict anti-abortion laws, but was the first to include an ordinance making it illegal for minors to leave the state to get an abortion without parental consent. This came after the passing of Texas’s State Bill 8 in 2021, referred by the pro-choice movement as the “Bounty Bill” due to its cash “bounty” for successfully suing anyone who has helped a person get an illegal abortion, even doctors living outside the state.
Texas State Bill 8 also bans abortions following the detection of a fetal pulse, which is typically around six weeks gestation. Idaho’s new law has created a crime named “abortion trafficking” that carries a penalty of two to five years in jail for anyone who helps a person under 18 get an abortion or obtain abortion pills without permission from a parent or guardian.
According to Slate, a staunchly liberal publication that leans over 75% left according to multiple polls, “Every trafficking ordinance builds the case for later recognition of fetal personhood.” While this was originally written as a dire warning for the pro-choice movement, it can be used as a battle cry for pro-life groups and individuals. Every new law that further prohibits abortion inherently recognizes the fetus as a human.
It is impossible to discuss abortion trafficking without also visiting the subject of sex trafficking, as the two are intertwined in one sickening, insidious union. The pursuit of a perceived easier life feeds the delusion that another life is worth sacrificing. Abortion’s heartbeat sacrifice meets sex trafficking’s identity sacrifice, building off of and reflecting each other in an echochamber of evil.
Before Cecile Richards retired as the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 2018, she frequently claimed that her organization was part of the solution to sexual abuse in America, when in contrast it has aided the spread of all abuse worldwide. Rather than reporting suspected abuse to authorities, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly looked the other way, performing abortions on victims as young as 12 years old–without permission from a parent or guardian–before returning those victims to the arms of their abusers.
Planned Parenthood was the most-visited facility for sex trafficking victims, second only to emergency rooms. One study, issued by the Loyola University School of Law, found that among the sixty-six sex trafficking victims involved, 114 abortions had taken place, with coercion playing a role in many of those cases. Nearly 75% of the women in a 2017 study said that their decision to abort their pregnancy was not free from outside pressure.
After Planned Parenthood was exposed in Live Action’s 2011 human trafficking investigation, it publicly pledged that all health center staff in contact with patients and teens would “be retrained in understanding our policies and procedures for responding to situations that indicate that the welfare of a minor is endangered.” But Ramona Treviño, a former Planned Parenthood manager who attended the training, revealed that Planned Parenthood instead used those meetings “to teach employees how to avoid being caught” in future hidden camera investigations.
While Planned Parenthood could have used this training opportunity to help women and children who are still being beaten, raped, and held against their will, the corporation instead chose to cover its tracks. Planned Parenthood’s own website claims that no one should tolerate abuse and even recommends that victims come to Planned Parenthood for medical attention. “They walked into our clinic looking for answers, looking for someone to give them hope,” Treviño says. “But I hadn’t given them that. I had only made things worse.”
It is important to note that Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest recipient of federal Title X family planning funds. Since 1999, federal regulations have ruled that Title X recipients are not exempt from state laws mandating the reporting of suspected child neglect, abuse, rape, and incest. Additionally, the Title X program handbook explicitly states that “Title X recipients must not provide abortion as a method of family planning.”
Planned Parenthood has been receiving $60 million annually in Title X funding since 1970, with close to 80% of its facilities currently receiving benefits. Planned Parenthood’s willful failures to report abuse provide enough supporting evidence for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers Title X, to investigate how widespread these failures are and whether other violations at Planned Parenthood have been covered up.
Staggeringly, every one of the sixty-six cases in Loyola University’s report was only brought to the attention of authorities because someone other than Planned Parenthood came forward. After Tyler Kost allegedly impregnated a 15-year-old in 2013, the victim sought an abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Tempe, Arizona.
According to news reports and the sheriff’s report, the Planned Parenthood counselor told the victim that “they did not want the hassle of having to report the assault to law enforcement as they were a mandatory reporter.” The counselor then allegedly intentionally miscoded the sexual assault report as a “consensual encounter” to avoid reporting it to police. Tyler Kost was eventually sentenced to three years in prison for sexually assaulting thirteen girls.
Planned Parenthood’s repeated refusal to file even mandatory reports, documented in Loyola University’s study, has been deliberate and widespread. The reality of forced abortion as it occurs in sex trafficking completely eclipses the political boundaries of the abortion debate, violating both the pro-life belief that abortion takes an innocent life and the pro-choice ideal of a woman’s freedom to make her own sexual and reproductive choices.
This is proven in Planned Parenthood’s systemic failure to report statutory rape, incest, and all other forms of sexual abuse. One victim counted in Loyola University’s study said she was taken to Planned Parenthood “because they didn’t ask any questions.” This is unquestioningly anti-woman.
There are altogether too many scenarios in which a victim is forced to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their abuser’s pursuit of freedom. “If you are talking temporary freedom, the chance to make your life be about things and what you can acquire, of focusing on yourself and your wants, then, yes, this can give you that freedom, to a point,” Ramona Treviño stated. “If you’re talking about long-lasting freedom, the kind that makes you feel truly free in knowing that you have followed a path that is right, that is lived for others, then [abortion] will lead to darkness.”
While Planned Parenthood’s role in sex trafficking is clear, the underlying ideology that someone’s humanity is irrelevant seems less obvious. But surely the unborn child’s humanity and personhood, with the human rights that entails, is the single most relevant issue in the whole abortion debate. It is easy to praise somebody for taking a life when that life was thought to be worthless anyway. A child conceived by rape is as precious and worthy of life as a child conceived by love, because a child is a child; the point is not how he was conceived but that he was conceived.
Furthermore, broadcasting that a woman has the right to choose how to use her body only reinforces the reasoning behind rape. A man’s hand is part of his body, but he is not free to use it to hit or steal from a woman or child–how much more this applies to his reproductive organs! We should be grateful for laws that stand in the way of doing whatever one wants with his own body. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionist and leader of the suffragette movement, commented on abortion this way: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we wish.”
To be fair, there is wide disagreement on the number of pregnancies caused by rape, since neither the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the U.S. Department of Justice keeps data on those statistics. Whatever the number, rape is a horrible crime and every victim deserves our sympathy and help; and in a resulting pregnancy both victims–mother and child–deserve the best possible care.
We cannot and should not allow the horror of rape reflect upon either the innocent woman or the innocent child. There is a dark synonymy in the attack on a woman in a rape and the attack on a child in an abortion: both are done at the expense of an innocent person, and the violence of abortion is never a solution to the violence of rape. Creating a second victim doesn’t undo the damage to the first.
Human trafficking is a $150 billion per year global industry, the second-most profitable form of transnational crime after drug trafficking. It most frequently takes the form of sex trafficking, which rakes in an estimated $99 billion per year. The most current numbers estimate that 2.4% of pregnancies are due to rape, incest, or other forms of violence.
Were we to be generous with the numbers and cut them in half, if the 1.2% of babies conceived in violence were not aborted, nearly $1.2 billion sex trafficking income would be lost to pregnancy annually–and that’s only if the pregnant victim were never to be trafficked again. Using those same statistics, abortion organizations gained $51 million from abortions from rape, but those same abortions cost the global economy nearly $83 billion. How different our communities, our states, our world would look if we invested that amount of money into the rescue, safekeeping, and recovery of all sex trafficking victims.
To dispute abortion trafficking’s involvement in sex trafficking is self-deception, willingly following the perverted idea that nobody’s life is worth as much as your own. Instead of forcing others to sacrifice their own identity, perspective, and heartbeat, they should be welcomed to a place of healing, wholeness, and loving truth. Our goal should be for others to gain something from us, not lose something because of our own harmful actions.
Removing an abuser’s ability to get rid of or ignore the consequences of his actions separates the flame of abortion from the fire of sexual abuse. It is impossible to be pro-life without standing with and for victims of abuse. Abortion and rape both take a life, yet in both cases there is a chance for the life to be saved.
Abortion after rape is not a comfort. Continuing to write and enforce laws that protect these victims takes the power from the abuser’s hands and places it into the hands of the victimized women and children. Speaking against abortion means also speaking against sex trafficking, against abuse, against the mindset that there is no way out. There is a way to stop the cycle, and it involves you and me.
Cover photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash
Wendy Moses is an author and disability advocate from Milton, Florida. She has a passion for reading, dogs, and writing at the local coffee shop.
What Abortion Advocates Won’t Tell You About Their Role in Human Trafficking
Wendy Moses
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In April of this year, Idaho joined twelve other states in passing strict anti-abortion laws, but was the first to include an ordinance making it illegal for minors to leave the state to get an abortion without parental consent. This came after the passing of Texas’s State Bill 8 in 2021, referred by the pro-choice movement as the “Bounty Bill” due to its cash “bounty” for successfully suing anyone who has helped a person get an illegal abortion, even doctors living outside the state.
Texas State Bill 8 also bans abortions following the detection of a fetal pulse, which is typically around six weeks gestation. Idaho’s new law has created a crime named “abortion trafficking” that carries a penalty of two to five years in jail for anyone who helps a person under 18 get an abortion or obtain abortion pills without permission from a parent or guardian.
According to Slate, a staunchly liberal publication that leans over 75% left according to multiple polls, “Every trafficking ordinance builds the case for later recognition of fetal personhood.” While this was originally written as a dire warning for the pro-choice movement, it can be used as a battle cry for pro-life groups and individuals. Every new law that further prohibits abortion inherently recognizes the fetus as a human.
It is impossible to discuss abortion trafficking without also visiting the subject of sex trafficking, as the two are intertwined in one sickening, insidious union. The pursuit of a perceived easier life feeds the delusion that another life is worth sacrificing. Abortion’s heartbeat sacrifice meets sex trafficking’s identity sacrifice, building off of and reflecting each other in an echochamber of evil.
Before Cecile Richards retired as the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 2018, she frequently claimed that her organization was part of the solution to sexual abuse in America, when in contrast it has aided the spread of all abuse worldwide. Rather than reporting suspected abuse to authorities, Planned Parenthood has repeatedly looked the other way, performing abortions on victims as young as 12 years old–without permission from a parent or guardian–before returning those victims to the arms of their abusers.
Planned Parenthood was the most-visited facility for sex trafficking victims, second only to emergency rooms. One study, issued by the Loyola University School of Law, found that among the sixty-six sex trafficking victims involved, 114 abortions had taken place, with coercion playing a role in many of those cases. Nearly 75% of the women in a 2017 study said that their decision to abort their pregnancy was not free from outside pressure.
After Planned Parenthood was exposed in Live Action’s 2011 human trafficking investigation, it publicly pledged that all health center staff in contact with patients and teens would “be retrained in understanding our policies and procedures for responding to situations that indicate that the welfare of a minor is endangered.” But Ramona Treviño, a former Planned Parenthood manager who attended the training, revealed that Planned Parenthood instead used those meetings “to teach employees how to avoid being caught” in future hidden camera investigations.
While Planned Parenthood could have used this training opportunity to help women and children who are still being beaten, raped, and held against their will, the corporation instead chose to cover its tracks. Planned Parenthood’s own website claims that no one should tolerate abuse and even recommends that victims come to Planned Parenthood for medical attention. “They walked into our clinic looking for answers, looking for someone to give them hope,” Treviño says. “But I hadn’t given them that. I had only made things worse.”
It is important to note that Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest recipient of federal Title X family planning funds. Since 1999, federal regulations have ruled that Title X recipients are not exempt from state laws mandating the reporting of suspected child neglect, abuse, rape, and incest. Additionally, the Title X program handbook explicitly states that “Title X recipients must not provide abortion as a method of family planning.”
Planned Parenthood has been receiving $60 million annually in Title X funding since 1970, with close to 80% of its facilities currently receiving benefits. Planned Parenthood’s willful failures to report abuse provide enough supporting evidence for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers Title X, to investigate how widespread these failures are and whether other violations at Planned Parenthood have been covered up.
Staggeringly, every one of the sixty-six cases in Loyola University’s report was only brought to the attention of authorities because someone other than Planned Parenthood came forward. After Tyler Kost allegedly impregnated a 15-year-old in 2013, the victim sought an abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Tempe, Arizona.
According to news reports and the sheriff’s report, the Planned Parenthood counselor told the victim that “they did not want the hassle of having to report the assault to law enforcement as they were a mandatory reporter.” The counselor then allegedly intentionally miscoded the sexual assault report as a “consensual encounter” to avoid reporting it to police. Tyler Kost was eventually sentenced to three years in prison for sexually assaulting thirteen girls.
Planned Parenthood’s repeated refusal to file even mandatory reports, documented in Loyola University’s study, has been deliberate and widespread. The reality of forced abortion as it occurs in sex trafficking completely eclipses the political boundaries of the abortion debate, violating both the pro-life belief that abortion takes an innocent life and the pro-choice ideal of a woman’s freedom to make her own sexual and reproductive choices.
This is proven in Planned Parenthood’s systemic failure to report statutory rape, incest, and all other forms of sexual abuse. One victim counted in Loyola University’s study said she was taken to Planned Parenthood “because they didn’t ask any questions.” This is unquestioningly anti-woman.
There are altogether too many scenarios in which a victim is forced to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their abuser’s pursuit of freedom. “If you are talking temporary freedom, the chance to make your life be about things and what you can acquire, of focusing on yourself and your wants, then, yes, this can give you that freedom, to a point,” Ramona Treviño stated. “If you’re talking about long-lasting freedom, the kind that makes you feel truly free in knowing that you have followed a path that is right, that is lived for others, then [abortion] will lead to darkness.”
While Planned Parenthood’s role in sex trafficking is clear, the underlying ideology that someone’s humanity is irrelevant seems less obvious. But surely the unborn child’s humanity and personhood, with the human rights that entails, is the single most relevant issue in the whole abortion debate. It is easy to praise somebody for taking a life when that life was thought to be worthless anyway. A child conceived by rape is as precious and worthy of life as a child conceived by love, because a child is a child; the point is not how he was conceived but that he was conceived.
Furthermore, broadcasting that a woman has the right to choose how to use her body only reinforces the reasoning behind rape. A man’s hand is part of his body, but he is not free to use it to hit or steal from a woman or child–how much more this applies to his reproductive organs! We should be grateful for laws that stand in the way of doing whatever one wants with his own body. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionist and leader of the suffragette movement, commented on abortion this way: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we wish.”
To be fair, there is wide disagreement on the number of pregnancies caused by rape, since neither the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the U.S. Department of Justice keeps data on those statistics. Whatever the number, rape is a horrible crime and every victim deserves our sympathy and help; and in a resulting pregnancy both victims–mother and child–deserve the best possible care.
We cannot and should not allow the horror of rape reflect upon either the innocent woman or the innocent child. There is a dark synonymy in the attack on a woman in a rape and the attack on a child in an abortion: both are done at the expense of an innocent person, and the violence of abortion is never a solution to the violence of rape. Creating a second victim doesn’t undo the damage to the first.
Human trafficking is a $150 billion per year global industry, the second-most profitable form of transnational crime after drug trafficking. It most frequently takes the form of sex trafficking, which rakes in an estimated $99 billion per year. The most current numbers estimate that 2.4% of pregnancies are due to rape, incest, or other forms of violence.
Were we to be generous with the numbers and cut them in half, if the 1.2% of babies conceived in violence were not aborted, nearly $1.2 billion sex trafficking income would be lost to pregnancy annually–and that’s only if the pregnant victim were never to be trafficked again. Using those same statistics, abortion organizations gained $51 million from abortions from rape, but those same abortions cost the global economy nearly $83 billion. How different our communities, our states, our world would look if we invested that amount of money into the rescue, safekeeping, and recovery of all sex trafficking victims.
To dispute abortion trafficking’s involvement in sex trafficking is self-deception, willingly following the perverted idea that nobody’s life is worth as much as your own. Instead of forcing others to sacrifice their own identity, perspective, and heartbeat, they should be welcomed to a place of healing, wholeness, and loving truth. Our goal should be for others to gain something from us, not lose something because of our own harmful actions.
Removing an abuser’s ability to get rid of or ignore the consequences of his actions separates the flame of abortion from the fire of sexual abuse. It is impossible to be pro-life without standing with and for victims of abuse. Abortion and rape both take a life, yet in both cases there is a chance for the life to be saved.
Abortion after rape is not a comfort. Continuing to write and enforce laws that protect these victims takes the power from the abuser’s hands and places it into the hands of the victimized women and children. Speaking against abortion means also speaking against sex trafficking, against abuse, against the mindset that there is no way out. There is a way to stop the cycle, and it involves you and me.
Cover photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash
Wendy Moses
Wendy Moses is an author and disability advocate from Milton, Florida. She has a passion for reading, dogs, and writing at the local coffee shop.
The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Human Defense Initiative.
Wendy Moses
COMMENTARY
NATIONAL
INTERNATIONAL
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