Republicans on oversight committee accuse AG Kris Mayes of ‘shilling’ for Planned Parenthood

The Arizona House Republicans heading the Committee on Executive Oversight made some wild allegations against Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes during a Wednesday meeting. 

Among numerous other claims, some GOP members of the committee accused her of colluding with Planned Parenthood to drive more women to their clinics to obtain abortions in an effort to bolster their bottom line.

And Chairwoman Jacqueline Parker, R-Mesa, was one of several lawmakers who said they believed that was Mayes’ intent when she published a consumer alert telling women that crisis pregnancy centers misrepresent their services. 

Crisis pregnancy centers are operated by anti-abortion groups and don’t offer abortions but provide other services like ultrasounds and free diapers and car seats, but Mayes accused them of tricking women into coming to their clinics and then pressuring them not to have abortions. While some crisis pregnancy centers don’t provide medical care, others have OBGYNs and nurses on staff to provide services throughout pregnancy.

The representatives of crisis pregnancy centers, including Choices Pregnancy Centers and Life Choices Women’s Clinic, who attended Wednesday’s meeting adamantly denied that. 

The committee seemed to be basing the allegation against Mayes on testimony from several leaders of crisis pregnancy centers who were clearly angered by the consumer alert. None of them claimed to have direct knowledge or evidence of any collusion between Planned Parenthood and Mayes. 

Parker accused Mayes of “using taxpayer resources to uplift the abortion industry, which is very, very alarming.” 

Richie Taylor, a spokesman for Mayes, told the Arizona Mirror that the allegations were “ridiculous.” 

“These comments from Rep. Parker are outrageous and absolutely unacceptable from a member of the Legislature,” Taylor wrote in an email. “There is zero truth to her assertions. Attorney General Mayes is committed to ensuring Arizonans can access reproductive healthcare. Rep. Parker on the other hand was key in blocking the repeal of a law that will harm women’s health and could very well lead to deaths. Rep. Parker should retract her baseless comments and apologize to Attorney General Mayes.” 

But Parker wasn’t the only legislator on the committee that made those allegations. 

“It seems to be obvious to me she is shilling for Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, and using that in her legal practice against the people of the state of Arizona,” said Rep. John Gillette, a Republican from Kingman. 

During the meeting, Garrett Riley, executive director of the Arizona Life Coalition, a nonprofit that supports crisis pregnancy centers and promotes the anti-abortion movement in general, accused Mayes of spreading misinformation about crisis pregnancy centers. 

“The attorney general seems misinformed or intent on damaging our reputation,” Riley said. “None of the centers I know use misleading tactics.”

But he countered those claims with his own about Planned Parenthood. 

“Organizations like Planned Parenthood are substantially financially motivated to push and sell abortions,” Rileys said. “The main goal of abortion centers is to persuade patients to have abortions.” 

Arizona law requires providers to make multiple disclosures to patients at least 24 hours prior to them obtaining an abortion, including the “probable anatomical and physiological characteristics” of the fetus when the procedure is scheduled to be performed.

He also claimed that Planned Parenthood has abortion quotas, something that the organization has denied for years. 

Planned Parenthood of Arizona says that abortions account for less than 10% of the services it provides, in addition to birth control, testing for sexually transmitted infections and things like pap tests. 

House Speaker Ben Toma created the Committee on Executive Oversight on March 26 “specifically to investigate allegations of the abuse of power, dereliction of duty, and/or malfeasance.”

The committee was tasked with investigating Mayes and other state officials to recommend potential legislation and to “deter partisan abuse and weaponization of the office of Arizona Attorney General or other state offices.”

Hours before the Committee on Executive Oversight hosted its first meeting on April 4, Mayes called the panel a “sham” and told reporters that Republicans were wasting taxpayer money in an effort to distract from her office’s accomplishments. 

None of the Democratic representatives assigned to the committee have attended its two meetings so far, with the House’s No. 2 Democrat, Oscar De Los Santos, calling the committee a “joke.” 

The Republican legislators on the committee are looking into a wide range of Mayes’ activities as attorney general, including a series of town hall meetings she hosted in rural Arizona, during which she gathered evidence for a possible public nuisance lawsuit against foreign companies that she says are over-pumping groundwater. 

The committee is also investigating what they called Mayes’ targeting of Cochise County officials and their handling of elections — she has indicted GOP county supervisors for their failure to certify the 2022 election on time — as well as what the committee characterized as threats she made against the Mohave County Board of Supervisor for considering hand-counting ballots in this year’s elections. 

Mayes sent the Mohave County supervisors a letter in November, just before they were set to vote on a hand count for 2024, informing them that state law doesn’t give them the authority to order a full hand count. 

The majority of Wednesday’s meeting was taken up with stories from the heads of crisis pregnancy centers, as well as parents of girls who participate in school sports who are angry over Mayes’ refusal to defend in court Arizona’s 2022 ban on transgender girls playing on the sports teams that align with their gender identity. The AG said the law was unconstitutional and she wouldn’t defend it.

That law is not currently being enforced amidst a court challenge filed by two transgender athletes. 

The committee has sent Mayes multiple public records requests to gather evidence in its investigation, but has not yet received the records it has requested, Parker said.