A stunning report has revealed that Planned Parenthood helped draft the Colorado secretary of state’s call for a boycott of the state of Alabama over the recently passed HB 314 abortion-ban law.
9News, a local NBC affiliate in Colorado, explained that before Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D-CO) on Thursday announced she was restricting employee travel to Alabama in response to the new law, Griswold worked with representatives of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains on what she would say.
Internal emails obtained by 9News provide an eye-opening look into how Griswold involved Planned Parenthood in an official declaration regarding the travel of state employees under her purview.
Griswold called on the Colorado Election Center to relocate their training outside of Alabama and is restricting Colorado Department of State employees’ travel to the Yellowhammer State.
Emails show that Griswold, at Planned Parenthood’s request, dropped a line in her statement indicating that her staffers did not actually need to go to Alabama because the relevant training would be available in Denver anyway.
Planned Parenthood told the Colorado secretary of state that information was not such that the “media need to know.”
Not only did Griswold outsource editing of her official statement to this special interest group, she also accepted Planned Parenthood suggestions that were explicitly based on the group’s internal poll results.
One of these poll-tested Planned Parenthood changes included Griswold removing the term “Right to Choose.”
This change was made because Planned Parenthood said, “We don’t recommend using right to choose/pro-life/pro-choice language anymore.”
Planned Parenthood lamented this type of language “turns folks off.”
Instead, Planned Parenthood worked to make Griswold’s statement “more digestible for the mainstream/media.”
It was not immediately clear if Planned Parenthood is involved in other government entity boycotts of Alabama over the new abortion-ban law, such as Los Angeles County.
Planned Parenthood has claimed HB 314 “would be a death sentence for women across this state.”
Planned Parenthood’s latest attack on Alabama comes after the organization and allied out-of-state liberal groups spent approximately $1.5 million in dark money opposition to Amendment Two on the state’s November 2018 general election ballot. That pro-life constitutional amendment still passed comfortably.
Planned Parenthood is currently constructing a new facility in Birmingham. Pro-life groups continue to protest this construction site. The facility is scheduled to be opened this year, according to a Planned Parenthood spokesperson.
Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
