Did Planned Parenthood help Arizona rapist go free?

Planned Parenthood Arizona is under fire again for alleged misconduct—but this time, the charges aren’t coming from undercover pro-life activists. The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office alleges that the abortion center intentionally hid a rape involving what turned out to be a serial rapist.

The Casa Grande Dispatch discovered documents implicating Planned Parenthood while investigating the April 28 arrest of 18-year-old Tyler Kost, who is accused of raping or molesting at least 18 girls in San Tan Valley. The sheriff’s office report based on detectives’ interviews included a girl who said she became pregnant after Kost raped her last year. The girl’s mother told a Planned Parenthood staff member about the assault at the girl’s New Year’s Eve appointment.

“The counselor intentionally miscoded the assault as a consensual encounter,” the report states. “The counselor told them that they did not want the hassle of having to report the assault to law enforcement as they were a mandatory reporter.”

Abortion centers must report suspected sexual assaults, but Planned Parenthood never did, police say. According to the Phoenix CBS affiliate, the rapes occurred over a period of about three years. Some of the girls left the state in fear, while another attempted suicide.

This isn’t the first run-in with the law for Planned Parenthood or other Arizona abortionists. Pro-life activist Lila Rose and her undercover investigators from Live Action alleged in 2008 that two Arizona Planned Parenthood centers failed to report statutory rape, coaching the girls on how to get a judge to exempt them from the state’s parental consent law.

Those incidents and dozens of others nationwide are the subject of Live Action’s soon-to-be-released summary of its last six years of undercover operations and reporting. This latest revelation by Arizona police only underscores why Live Action demands in the report that law enforcement subpoena all of Planned Parenthood’s ID-redacted records for minors. Ample evidence exists of a pattern of misinformation and cover-ups at Planned Parenthood, Live Action claims.

The report details video and audio investigations of Planned Parenthood workers coaching sex traffickers of minors, lying about fetal development, facilitating sex-selective abortions of girls, and accepting donations from investigators posing as white supremacists who want to encourage African-American abortions.

Further Live Action evidence indicates no Planned Parenthood centers offer mammograms, despite explicit claims from Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards and President Barack Obama during federal funding fights. In another investigation, just two months after a Chicago Planned Parenthood center let a client bleed to death, Live Action recorded a staff member denying anyone had ever suffered an injury at the facility.

Despite the evidence, though, abortion centers usually don’t see much of a backlash from those in power. A recent Arizona law shoring up abortion standards came partly because of a Live Action video showing an Arizona abortionist, who was not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, appearing to admit to letting babies die after they were born alive.

Planned Parenthood claims it can police its own employes. It fired several workers featured in Live Action’s videos, and other employees face “retraining,” the organization said.

But it often takes a pro-life legislature to put safeguards in place. Planned Parenthood’s federal funding still tops $500 million, despite the $71 million Live Action claims the abortion provider has lost because of its investigations. The abortion industry is adept at derailing official investigations through litigation and deflecting attention through political allies and personal attacks on investigators.

For now, the Kost case appears to be more of the same. Planned Parenthood Arizona has promised to “reiterate” its reporting policies to employees. The Dispatch said it was unclear how many abuse cases Planned Parenthood actually did report last year, but police pledged to look into the potential misconduct.