Mark Crutcher’s obsession

Conservatives have long rallied around the cause of criminalizing abortion. In keeping with the popular drumbeat, the overarching concern seems to be urging “President Bush to nominate only U.S. Supreme Court judges who will faithfully interpret the Constitution in order to repair our nation’s last line of defense against judicial tyranny,” as stated on Petitions.com, a conservative Web site.

Mark Crutcher

Likewise, a large number of petitions are also circulating that urge states’ attorneys general to “probe and prosecute Planned Parenthood’s illegal policies.” To date, more than 5,000 petitions have been sent demanding an investigation into a “startling study by Life Dynamics Inc.” that proves Planned Parenthood knowingly “conceals the crimes of sexual abuse of minors, while aiding and abetting the sexual predators who commit them.”

While it is unclear whether or not this particular petition spurred action, investigations of Planned Parenthood on the basis of the Life Dynamics study are now being conducted in several states.

Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter began an investigation of Planned Parenthood last month, echoing a similar investigation that begun last year by Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline.

In early March, an investigator for Indiana’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, a division of the Attorney General’s Office, visited three Planned Parenthood clinics requesting and receiving the medical files of eight patients for his investigation of Medicaid fraud. A few weeks later, Planned Parenthood was notified that the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit now wants 73 more files from 19 additional clinics.

Planned Parenthood has refused to turn over the files, maintaining that they have done their jobs as mandated by law and that the attorney general is simply on a “fishing expedition.” Further, they maintain that without evidence of a crime or evidence of fraud, the attorney general has no right to violate the rights of privacy their patients are entitled to.

The attorney general has said very little about the investigation. He did release a statement that said his office “is obligated under federal and state statutes to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect by Medicaid providers.”

The accusations and language of the conservative petitions and the attorneys general are consistent with the evidence released from an “undercover sting operation” conducted by Texas-based Life Dynamics Inc.

And Life Dynamics is not shy about taking credit for spurring the investigations. On its “ChildPredators.com” Web site, the organization boasts “Abortion Industry Busted: Planned Parenthood Caught Protecting Child Rapists.” A press release then provides details of the investigations in Kansas and Indiana, as well as the details of their undercover operation.

Life Dynamics founder and president Mark Crutcher is a father, a husband, a former car salesman and a self-proclaimed “guerrilla fighter” in the war against abortion. Like most of those seeking to criminalize abortion, Crutcher blames the U.S. Supreme Court for legalizing murder.

“On Jan. 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decreed that every child conceived in America could be legally butchered for any reason whatsoever, at any time until the moment of birth. With that ruling, the American holocaust began, and we were soon to learn that ours was going to make Hitler and his storm troopers look like a Girl Scout troop,” he claims.

To that end, Crutcher has spent the past 10 years attempting to avenge what he considers an egregious wrong. One of his first efforts to derail legalized abortion came with the publication of his book LIME 5 that outlined the conspiracy of the U.S. government, particularly the Centers for Disease Control, to provide false records and statistics concerning the safety of abortion.

“With virtually no exceptions, abortionists are the losers, rejects and washouts of the medical community who couldn’t compete in, or were drummed out of, legitimate medicine. Over and over, we saw irrefutable proof that good physicians don’t ascend into the practice of abortion, but instead bad ones descend into it.” To those who counter these arguments that there are many statistics showing abortion is safe, Crutcher responds, “Anytime you see a statistical chart about abortion injury, sexual assault or death, the person who compiled that chart is either very misinformed or is lying.”

The release of LIME 5 in 1996 caused very little stir outside of the anti-abortion community. One of Crutcher’s claims, however, is partially responsible for the creation of the urban myth that abortion causes breast cancer.

“Cases of breast cancer, now considered by some to be in epidemic proportions, have tripled in number since 1960. The environment hasn’t changed much and only two factors are different. One is the availability of the birth control pill and the other is the fact that abortions have been made available and legal. Obviously today, there are millions of abortions every year, whereas in 1960, there were very few abortions,” he says.

Crutcher dismisses the theory that oral contraceptives cause breast cancer because “if one considers that breast cancer has also tripled in incidence among Russian women where only abortion (not the pill) has been easily obtainable in the last 20 years, the finger seems to point more and more at abortion as the culprit.”

Recently, Life Dynamics has focused its attention on the legal system and now advertises its “litigation support services.” The Life Dynamics Abortion Malpractice Program (ABMAL) is a “legal support network” with 700 lawyers, 500 expert witnesses, “inside” information about the abortion industry gathered by “spies,” radio, TV and print advertising, and 800 number crisis lines for women injured by abortions seeking legal help.

The goal of ABMAL is to clog the courts with hundreds of malpractice cases that will drive insurance rates up and doctors out of business.

“The formula is simple. Every time we reduce access, we reduce the abortion rate, and every time we reduce the abortion rate, we reduce the abortion industry’s political strength. If we continue that process, there will come a point at which we will so decimate the abortion industry’s ability to continue the fight, that our political effort will have a legitimate chance for success,” Crutcher explains.

His two most recent publications, “Access: The Key to Pro-Life Victory” and “Eyewitness: Child Sexual Abuse and Abortion Clinics Guide for Sidewalk Counselors,” detail the ways in which anti-abortion activists can use the legal system against Planned Parenthood.

In the “Eyewitness” manual, Crutcher gives anti-abortion activists practical tips on how to document abuse and “report evidence of a possible felony.” The manual notes, “When you are in front of the abortion mill … video tape every girl walking into the facility who you suspect of being underage, the people who accompany her and the vehicle they came in, including its license plate.”

The good news, according to Crutcher, is that this “could be the beginning of the end for Planned Parenthood. With your help, we can make these people pay for what they’re doing and in the process destroy them!”

“If this were a game of poker, we’d be the ones holding all the aces and they’d be the ones trying to bluff us,” he writes in “Access.”

Crutcher’s plan is simple: If an underage girl is going to Planned Parenthood, she is sexually active. If she is sexually active, she is the victim of sexual abuse. If she is a victim of sexual abuse, state mandated reporting is required.

In addition to publishing and providing litigation services, Life Dynamics recently added “research firm” to its moniker and released a “Life Dynamics Special Report” written by Crutcher that builds on the “Eyewitness” tactics described in the manual.

“We’ve recently exposed what can only be described as the largest criminal enterprise in U.S. history. Through an undercover investigation, we have proven that Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation are operating a nationwide pedophile protection racket, and they’re doing it with tax dollars!” the headline of the report reads.

It’s hard to say exactly how, when or what research was conducted. According to a report by the Traditional Values Coalition, “Life Dynamics encouraged a team of girls to call Planned Parenthood clinics and pretend to have been sexually abused by adult males. In case after case, PP counselors willingly ignored state law to cover up these molestations and violations of statutory rape laws! Each PP clinic that has covered up child molestation must be prosecuted.”

Life Dynamics claims that at some point in each of the 800 conversations, the caller asked if the age difference would be a “problem.” By law, of course, it is statutory rape (or child abuse, or child molestation depending on the state). In many of the cases, the clinic worker did explain the legal issues, but, according to Crutcher, in most the worker either ignored or brushed off the information.

Crutcher claims that the failure of the clinic workers answering the phones to report any criminal activity is “irrefutable evidence” that Planned Parenthood is “little more than corporate accomplices for sexual predators who target children” and at least two states’ attorneys general agree with him.

“Since this showdown recently broke in the national media, 10 other attorneys general have requested data from the Life Dynamics investigation. Stay tuned,” Crutcher says. “It may have been a long time in coming, but the fur is starting to fly.” But that’s not entirely true in all cases.

In California, Los Angeles County chief medical officer Thomas Garthwaite investigated complaints based on Life Dynamics evidence and “determined that the clinic was in compliance with the mandatory child abuse reporting requirements.”

In Connecticut, the Attorney General’s Office investigated the allegations and found “Planned Parenthood is conscientiously complying with the law and reporting when kids are in danger.”

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal went on to say in a formal ruling, “There is no automatic obligation to report such behavior in every situation. Mandated reporters must use their professional judgment to assess all situations involving minors.”

Last July, a U.S. District Court made the same ruling when denying Kansas Attorney General Kline’s request for access to Planned Parenthood files to investigate the child molestation charges based on Life Dynamic’s claims.

Kline is continuing his investigation and has recently expanded it to include the files of women who received late-term abortions in order to discover if any crimes were committed.

According to Crutcher, Kline has publicly acknowledged Life Dynamics’ role in spurring the Planned Parenthood investigation, but he can’t be as forthcoming about Indiana.

“I can’t comment on specifics. I can’t say if he’s using my research. But I can tell you that 11 states are using this information. I just can’t tell you which states those are. If they want to disclose my involvement, they can,” Crutcher said.

For his part, the Indiana attorney general has made no public statements about the investigation, leaving all questions for his press liaison, Staci Schneider. When asked about the connection between Life Dynamics and Steve Carter, Schneider would only reply, “I wouldn’t be able to confirm that.”

Crutcher is much less coy, “We did this investigation — the research and the sting operation — we turned all that over to the attorney general in 11 states and now some of those states are reacting. I can’t say what states I gave the information to, but it’s not hard to make the connection.”