New York Times: Planned Parenthood Golden Gate’s “meltdown”
Katharine Mieszkowski’s 3rd Bay Citizen installment investigating the demise of Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (read about previous 2 here and here) hit the big time August 28 when the New York Times picked it up (click to enlarge)…
Many helpful nuggets of info in the piece, excerpted below. Just wish the NYT had published PPGG’s infamous “Superhero for Choice” cartoon, as the Bay Citizen duplicate article did (although even the mention is a hoot):
A financial and administrative meltdown in recent years has led to the end of one of the largest Planned Parenthood affiliates in the United States.
Patients visiting PP’s 8 clinics in San Francisco and 4 other Bay Area counties often encountered wait times exceeding 2-1/2 hours. Shortages of critical supplies, including intrauterine devices, meant some patients were turned away.
Doctors, nurses, midwives and physician’s assistants complained to the national organization about low morale and a hostile work environment at PP Golden Gate, the local affiliate that owned and operated the clinics….
[T]ax filings show that the nonprofit lost $2.8 million during the 2008-9 tax year, at the same time its chief executive’s total compensation exceeded $340,000. The organization has not broken even since the 2005-6 tax year, records show….
Interviews with current and former staff members and executives of PPGG, as well as documents obtained by The Bay Citizen, show a health organization that was unraveling under the strain of financial distress, even as it portrayed itself as a robust institution that attracted high-profile supporters….
“It’s my opinion that the disaffiliation was unnecessary,” Dian Harrison, the longtime chief executive of PPGG, wrote in an e-mail interview.
Ms. Harrison has not led the organization since January 2010, when she went on leave for reasons that she declined to specify….
One report distributed by the organization included an animated cartoon starring Ms. Harrison, who transforms into a “Superhero for Choice” armed with a condom-shooting popgun that scatters anti-abortion protesters. [No, not “scattering,” blowing up.]
Harrison won the admiration of wealthy donors and board members, who praised her as an innovative leader whose vision for social justice extended far beyond the Bay Area, even leading her to forge a partnership in Ethiopia to try to improve reproductive health care there.
Yet many staff members saw Harrison and her team as out of touch with their daily realities, creating a dysfunctional corporate culture. Some former employees still hold occasional get-togethers dubbed the “PPGG PTSD Support Group.”…
According to a 2007 internal report by the national organization, its finances were the worst among the top 10 largest affiliates in the country….
“There were days when patients would come to see if they were pregnant and we couldn’t tell them because we had no pregnancy tests in stock,” said a doctor who no longer works for the affiliate….
This year, PPGG tried unsuccessfully to interest other Bay Area affiliates in buying some of its clinic buildings or merging….
In the wake of PPGG’s crisis, some of its health services have already been reduced. In June 2010, its Redwood City clinic closed, and abortion services at some other clinics have been significantly cut back….
“There has never been any evidence that PPGG’s conduct jeopardizes patient care,” Ms. Wilson wrote in an e-mail….
[HT: LiveAction.org on Twitter]

1. Yay!
2. How the heck can they be tapping into so many tax dollars and STILL lose money? Were they using it for toilet paper?
3. Notice that killing a patient or performing an abortion on a patient who was just there for a pelvic exam won’t get you disaffiliated, but losing money will.
Greed, pure greed.
But, but, I thought The New York Times is liberal media and can’t be trusted!
Could you cite a source for that, Nick?
mp, no media outlet is good or bad 100% of the time. Our job is to praise them when they report fairly and call them out when they don’t. The NYT usually isn’t great, but every now and then they’ll pleasantly surprise us. Remember their piece on abortion photography in October of 2009?
“Remember their piece on abortion photography in October of 2009?”
Oh yeah, I forgot about that! That was astonishing. It was like I was living in another universe.
“Harrison won the admiration of wealthy donors and board members, who praised her as an innovative leader whose vision for social justice extended far beyond the Bay Area, even leading her to forge a partnership in Ethiopia to try to improve reproductive health care there.”
Social justice is a curious thing. It’s supposed to improve people’s lot in life. That’s the great lie the eugenists use as they systematically go about decimating the African American community through abortion and contraception. And what of all these young girls born to poverty and fatherless homes?
Unencumbered by babies, have these young women all gone off to college? Quite the opposite. The inner city today is utterly bereft of hope. In the same time frame that young men have been liberated from the responsibility for their sexual behavior, abortions have skyrocketed in this community. So too have STD’s, at vastly higher rates in African Americans than in any other demographic:
http://www.cdc.gov/std/health-disparities/default.htm
The inner city today is orders of magnitude meaner and crueler than anything that existed during the Civil Rights Movement. Planned Parenthood’s ministrations have played a big role in all of that. And for all their talk of the great benefits to young women through contraception and abortion, one would expect Harlem to look like Beverly Hills if the promise matched the “services”. Having been in Harlem recently, it’s safe to say that the dividend check for the decimation of a once great community still has not arrived as promised.
The worst of these filthy beasts at PP are the African American collaborators such as Dian Harrison who help PP make the KKK look like rank amateurs. She more than anyone knows better the grave harm she has been doing, fattening herself on women’s misery, especially African American women’s misery. And if she isn’t familiar with the CDC data, then she has fattened herself as a dupe for a pack of white eugenists.