Once Cecile Richards got past reading her falsehood-strewn opening statement and she testified under penalty of perjury we learned some interesting things.

Planned Parenthood has long maintained that abortion is only a small part, 3% is typically the number the pro-aborts use, of its business. As Rich Lowry wrote:

Planned Parenthood, embroiled in a scandal over secret videos capturing its cavalier dismemberment of unborn babies and sale of their body parts, insists that abortion is only 3 percent of what it does.

Practically every defender of the organization, fighting to preserve its federal funding, reverts to the 3 percent figure.

How could you possibly, they ask, defund a group that devotes itself overwhelmingly to uncontroversial procedures and services for women?

…

The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services.

So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.

By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.

Yesterday, under questioning by Representative [mc_name name=’Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’L000571′ ], Richards admitted that a staggering 86% of non-government revenue and revealed Planned Parenthood for what it is: an organization devoted to increasing the number of abortions in the United States. And [mc_name name=’Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’M001182′ ] drew an admission that if Congress defunded Planned Parenthood that it would have no effect on health services provided:

At a hearing on Planned Parenthood funding in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) pointed out to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards that the organization’s most recent tax report shows $127 million dollars of revenue in excess of expenses.

Mulvaney asked Richards whether taking away just the $60 million in discretionary funding appropriated by Congress of the more than $450 million in federal funding that the Congressional Budget Office estimates Planned Parenthood gets each year.

“One of the proposals here, Ms. Richards, is to defund Planned Parenthood, which includes taking roughly $60 million away from what you get out of discretionary funding,” Mulvaney said to Richards at a hearing of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, where she was a witness. “If we took $60 million away from you, you could still perform every single service that you gave last year, can’t you?”

Representative Jason Chaffetz drew blood with his questions about Planned Parenthood’s lavish spending:

The head of the House Oversight Committee is accusing Planned Parenthood of misspending more than $40 million in federal dollars on “lavish” travel, theme parties and a costly Manhattan office.

[mc_name name=’Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’C001076′ ] (R-Utah) on Tuesday accused the organization of racking up “exorbitant travel expenses,” including first-class flights, charter travel and entertainment costs that included $622,706 on “blowout parties” with celebrity guests.

Some of the themed parties had names such as “Gathering of Goddesses and Gods,” “Chocolate Champagne” and “Murder Mystery,” according to a report released by the committee during the hearing Tuesday.

The findings were the results of a months-long investigation into Planned Parenthood’s spending, in which the committee analyzed several years of tax returns.

Chaffetz also questioned the salary of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, who appeared before his panel for the first time on Tuesday.

“That’s money that’s not going to women’s healthcare,” Chaffetz said.
The Oversight report details Planned Parenthood’s total of $5,109,997 on travel in 2013, which averaged approximately $14,000 a day.

The committee’s report also noted Planned Parenthood’s real estate holdings, including $34.8 million for its corporate office space near Madison Square Garden in New York City in 2011. In 2015, it sold a 72,000 square-foot condominium to Brookfield Property Partners for $69.6 million.

Chaffetz also pointed out that the business of killing babies is damned lucrative:

“Your compensation in 2009 was $353,000,” Chaffetz said to Richards. “Congratulations. In 2013, your compensation went up some $240,000. Your compensation, we’re showing based on tax returns, is $590,000.”

In the course of her questioning, Richards told two whoppers. First, she admitted that Planned Parenthood did not provide mammograms. This was something we all knew but when people like Barack Obama keep mouthing the lie it is good to hear the head of Abortions-R-Us. Then she followed that up by saying Planned Parenthood had NEVER claimed to provide mammograms. This is not true. Here is video of Richards making that very claim. She also claimed she had never heard of a child being born alive after a botched abortion attempt. To believe this you have to believe that she has not been following the previous hearings on Planned Parenthood.

Overall it was a great showing by an energized, hostile, and prepared committee that reduced the left to claiming Chaffetz had been all meany-pants to Richards because he had treated her like a peer instead of like some poor woman desperately searching for a fainting couch.