So according to Everett, Planned Parenthood’s “agenda was to give women low-dose birth-control pills they knew [the women] would get pregnant on and to pass out defective condoms. I will go to my grave believing that their agenda was three to five abortions between the ages of 13 and 18 from every young woman they could find.” In an interview with Lee Ann McAdoo on InfoWars, she even claimed to have been involved in such practices herself back in the day to be able to “sell [a woman] an abortion on the telephone.” Indeed, according to Everett the whole idea of sex education is really only a vast ploy by the abortion industry to get teens pregnant so as to keep the industry profitable.
Of course, Everett’s story of how she went from being a director of abortion clinics to being an anti-abortion (and anti-sex) activist is used for all it’s worth as a rhetorical ploy in her presentations and interviews, and it has lent her some credibility both among the less well-hinged parts of the internet and among wingnut politicians, even though she obviously lies about her background, too. (And for the record, she had no affiliation with Planned Parenthood and has nothing resembling a background in medicine.) According to Everett, abortion is “unnatural” because it is an “interruption of the natural process” (so it’s unnatural in the sense that any medical procedure is unnatural) and “a terribly painful procedure.” The procedure is particularly harmful when performed “on a woman who is really not pregnant,” which she falsely (and insanely) alleges is “being done [today] on women who can be convinced they’re pregnant even though they aren’t.” And because it might be effective with certain audiences, Everett has also pushed the abortion-is-Black-genocideconspiracy theory: Planned Parenthood is, according to Everett, targeting Black communities and “until recently there was not a single abortion clinic located in a white, middle class area”, something that is stupendously and ridiculously false.
She is of course anti-contraception, too. According to Everett, emergency contraception is “destructive to a woman’s reproductive system” – it would “sterilize” them – and constitutes “a social experiment on children” (yes, she can just make things up whole cloth– those who bother to listen to her are not going to care). And as for her sex education conspiracy theories, they quickly veer into anti-LGBT land: sex education providers “break down” children’s “natural modesty” and teach them “perverse behavior”; now, apparently girls (who?) have been “telling me they were bisexual” because sex education has “broken down” children’s values. Indeed, sex education is a conspiracy to ensure that “the homosexual lifestyle is exploding” (she didn’t explain how that helps abortion providers “expand their market”). She has also alleged that Planned Parenthood has “a website that actually encourages sex with animals” designed for teens; when asked for an url, Everett supplied a link to an anti-abortion website that did not make the claim but which had published an excerpt from a 1981 study on sex in rural America that didn’t mention or have anything remotely to do with Planned Parenthood.
At the core of her views, is her hatred and fear of promiscuity; as Everett sees it, and as relayed to Rick Green at WallBuilders, it is “almost like rape when you’re having sex with two or three” different partners before getting married, because she herself cannot “imagine another woman who cares or respects herself who would” have sex with a man who has had other consenting partners before, and everyone should share her preferences; “the only thing that can help us recover is Jesus,” said Everett.
Everett is the founder and CEO of The Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization that purports to give women health “advice”, but which is not a medical provider and can accordingly not perform any actual healthcare services. That didn’t prevent the Texas legislature from awarding them $1.65 million in taxpayer money in 2016 for their “health care services”, which the organization – to repeat ourselves – does not provide. (According to themselves, “The Heidi Group exists to ensure that all Texas women have access to quality health care by coordinating services in a statewide network of full-service medical providers,” though what that involves is not explained). Everett admitted that much of the grant would be given to so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which is the preferred US euphemism for religious anti-abortion activist groups. The Heidi group’s efforts ran into the ground in 2018, when the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, after Texas had ‘inexplicably’ renewed their contract twice, were forced to conclude that there were “substantial deficiencies in the areas of contract compliance, service administration, and financial and administrative management of both contracts” – predictably, since the group was never in the business of (or had any competence to or inclination to be) offering the health care services or coordinating services they promised to deliver (“it’s not as easy as it looks”, admitted Everett, who is not the first to make that observation). Everett concluded that there was a conspiracy led by nefarious forces (Planned Parenthood) afoot, and dismissed the HHSC report as “lies” (she didn’t provide any further explanation or documentation).
The Heidi Group has partnered with anti-abortion groups like the Center of Medical Progress, and has helped spread CMP’s discredited conspiracy theories. Everett has also served as an “integral partner” to Operation Rescue, having herself recruited women who were “willing to go into the abortion clinics and be very aggressive” to secretly film inside and expose manufactured incidents that Everett alleged represented the “way women were being mistreated even today in the abortion clinics”
As a political actor, Everett and her group is nevertheless a force to be reckoned with in Texas. She has worked tirelessly to shut down funding to Planned Parenthood and direct money to anti-abortion activist groups She was for instance involved in the Texas push for requiring women to either bury or cremate the remains of an aborted fetus, testifying that if fetuses were flushed down toilets (not the relevant alternative, needless to say), we could face a public health disaster and that people could be afflicted with STDs or even HIV due to fetuses flooding the sewer systems. “What if one day something horrible escaped into the sewer system?” asked Everett [Please. Just. Pause. For. A. Moment. And. Assess. That. Piece. Of. Reasoning.]. In 2013, she similarly tried to argue, using one of the dumbest ‘what-if’s in the history of what-ifs, that abortion clinics needed to be regulated because of Ebola: “with the Ebola scare, … what [germs] would we be transferring [at clinics]?”
Diagnosis: Yes, she is demonstrably lying through her teeth and making things up as she goes, and seems to consider herself justified in doing that because Jesus. But despite being a wild-eyed and morally corrupt conspiracy theorist, Everett maintains significant political influence, especially in Texas. People listen to her, since she says what they want to hear, regardless of the obvious fact that she is clearly just making it up.
Hat-tip: Mediamatters