Texas officials on Thursday made unannounced visits to Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the state to demand “thousands of pages” of documents in what the healthcare group and its advocates called a “politically motivated” series of raids.
Agents from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s investigative arm turned up at Planned Parenthood chapters in Houston, Dallas, Brownsville, and San Antonio, to subpoena the clinics for documents including patient information, such as appointment schedules, ultrasound records, and test results; clinical notes and procedure reports; employees’ home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries; copies of contracts with outside entities that provide laboratory testing or patient data storage; and any other documents requested at the “discretion” of the inspector general.
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A subpoena delivered to the Dallas outpost also included a request for files from clinics in Austin and Waco.
All documents were due within 24 hours, the office said. The subpoenas were issued as part of Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen’s “fraud” investigation into Planned Parenthood’s billing practices—the latest effort to dismantle the group’s Texas chapters after Bowen moved to cut off its Medicaid funding days earlier, which would block healthcare services for low-income women and men.
Bowen’s office told the Texas Tribune it could not comment on ongoing investigations. At a news conference on Thursday, Planned Parenthood of the Texas Capital Region chief executive officer Ken Lambrecht said the raids were a “fishing expedition.”
Texas and other conservative states have stepped up their targeting of Planned Parenthood affiliates over alleged violations portrayed in a series of recent controversial “sting videos” concerning the group’s handling of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood has disputed the videos as inaccurate and deceptively edited and consistently denied any wrongdoing, but announced earlier this month it would stop taking reimbursements for fetal tissue donated for scientific research.
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