Following Colorado Media Matters item, Newsum on CIO named Post “Disgrace of the Week” for Planned Parenthood article

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

During the regular “Disgrace of the Week” segment on the August 24 broadcast of KBDI Channel 12's Colorado Inside Out, panelist Dani Newsum cited anti-abortion activist Leslie Hanks and The Denver Post for “letting [Hanks] get away with” asserting that Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) is “in the business to kill babies for profit” and that “they get young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don't work.” Newsum further stated that the Post needed “to be popped” because "[t]hey didn't come back with any facts regarding Planned Parenthood or the efficacy of birth control pills."

From the August 26 broadcast of KBDI Channel 12's Colorado Inside Out:

PATRICIA CALHOUN (host): So now on to the most fun part of the day. Mark? Your “Disgrace [of the Week]”?

[...]

NEWSUM: Leslie Hanks, from Colorado Right to Life, and The Denver Post for letting her get away with her twittish drivel. What she said was, “Let's face it” -- talking about Planned Parenthood -- “they're in the business to kill babies for profit. First and foremost, they get young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don't work.” Stupidity like that should hurt, and the Denver Post needs just to be popped, because they let her get away with it. They didn't come back with any facts regarding Planned Parenthood or the efficacy of birth control pills.

As Colorado Media Matters noted, an August 20 Post article by Karen Augé about a new family planning services clinic that PPRM is building in Denver uncritically reported Hanks' assertion that the organization “get[s] young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don't work.” In fact, according to the medical reference book Contraceptive Technology: Nineteenth Revised Edition (Ardent Media, 2007), oral contraceptives work with 92 percent efficacy for the first year of "[t]ypical [u]se" and are 99.7 percent effective with "[p]erfect [u]se."

Citing the same statistics from the 18th Revised Edition of Contraceptive Technology (Ardent Media, 2004), the Guttmacher Institute noted that 0.3 percent of women who use birth control pills perfectly will become pregnant in their first year of use, while 8 percent of women who practice typical usage of the pill will become pregnant in the first year of use. According to the authors' website, Contraceptive Technology is “the basic reference book in family planning for physicians and allied health personnel, has sold over 1,500,000 copies in the United States and has been translated into several languages. The authors work closely with 26 other respected clinicians, scientists, and educators to produce the books.”

By comparison, the figures provided by the Guttmacher Institute indicate that for women engaging in sex and using no method of birth control, 85 percent will become pregnant in the first year of doing so.