Things continue to go downhill for Planned Parenthood. The interim President and CEO of their southeast affiliate is currently under investigation by a law firm after a staff revolt suggested she was not sufficiently committed to the cause.
Planned Parenthood Southeast’s board has hired a law firm to investigate allegations against the abortion-rights group’s executive leadership, according to a statement from the organization.
The investigation comes after a group of former and current Planned Parenthood Southeast staff and board members launched a website and Instagram account, making a range of claims about interim President and CEO Mairo Akpose. Those claims allege Akpose expressed conservative views on sexual identity and that she is not fully supportive of Planned Parenthood’s stances on reproductive rights.
The website was hosted by KEACALI, a company cofounded by former Planned Parenthood Southeast President and CEO Carol McDonald who signed an agreement when they left the organization last year barring them from making disparaging statements about Planned Parenthood. (McDonald uses they/them pronouns.)
The website was a violation of the former CEO's employment agreement and Planned Parenthood lawyers had it pulled down, but the unhappy ex-staffers just moved over to Instagram and continued their attacks until the board called in a law firm to investigate. One of the offenses Akpose is charged with is failing to use people's correct pronouns and not showing enough support for "the trans community."
Since becoming CEO, Akpose’s detractors told the AJC she wouldn’t use the preferred pronouns of transgender and nonbinary staffers, in person and in emails, despite listing her own pronouns in her email signature...
Kaylah Oates-Marable, the former Georgia state director for Planned Parenthood Southeast, said she didn’t see Akpose advocate for LGBTQ issues during her tenure.
“Mairo has never once said anything regarding the LGBTQ community. She’s never talked about anything with the trans community. I’ve never heard her say anything that would show she’s an ally,” she said.
This looks like yet another case of woke employees setting aside things they were hired to do in order to focus on enforcing leftist dogmas inside the organization. According to the anonymous employees who are complaining, Akpose and the group's executive director aren't sufficiently clear on their support for abortion.
The PPSE personnel we spoke to described Akposé and her hires as not being aligned with Planned Parenthood’s core mission of defending abortion rights. Kaylah Oates-Marable, who was PPSE’s Georgia state director for policy advocacy until she was laid off last month, said Akposé complained at a recent meeting that “we talk about abortion too much, we focus too much on it. We have other things we could be focusing on.” Another former executive-level staffer, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, told us that Akposé “did not seem to understand that it was important to have medical leadership that prioritized family planning services and abortion care hand-in-hand, not just one or the other.”...
PPSE’s current executive director, who came on in August 2025, is Karen René, a former member of the city council for the city of East Point, outside Atlanta. In 2022, when she was serving as the director of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, René described her position on abortion in terms that now give PPSE’s staff pause. “As a Christian leader, and I am pro-life,” she told the Chicago Crusader, “but I am also pro-choice because I want to make sure that women are making the right decisions from where they stand that no one is pushing them one way or the other.”
These kind of purity tests are always what woke employees bring to the table. If you don't agree with them using exactly the words they prefer, you are a heretic. That seems to be what is happening here.
The real problem is that Planned Parenthood is dying. Clinics around the country are closing and the group's Medicaid funds are being cut off. That sets up a situation where there are fewer jobs and people getting fired are fighting over who should control the diminishing resources. These fights might still be happening in a thriving Planned Parenthood but they probably wouldn't be as vicious. The more clinics close, the worse this is going to get.
Speaking of which, a bunch of clinics are closing in southern California:
Citing a defunding provision in President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill, Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties announced this week it can no longer offer primary care services for 13,000 patients in its service area.
Officials Monday announced the imminent closure of Melody Health, which for the last 12 years has provided birth control, cancer screenings, diabetes management and behavioral health for the nonprofit...
The closure necessitates the layoff of 77 staff members who work in health centers in Costa Mesa, Anaheim, Santa Ana and elsewhere across the two counties. Another four health educators who conduct school problems in Orange and San Bernardino counties are also being eliminated due to a cessation in federal grant funding stipulated in the budget bill.
In all, at least 41 clinics are going to close this year. Planned Parenthood warned in advance of passage of the BBB that as many as 200 clinics might close. Unless they were exaggerating quite a bit, we probably have a lot more closures to come in the next few months.
