Opinion

Expose Planned Parenthood, Slayer of Life and Family

“[Parents] should be assisted, guided and directed in every way to eliminate the undesirable offspring, who usually contribute nothing to our civilization but use up the energy and resources of the world.”

― From Margaret Sanger's “Seven Basic Principles of Planned Parenthood,” given at the Third International Planned Parenthood Conference in Bombay, India in 1952.

April 24, 2018 (Human Life International) – What is it going to take to stop sending hundreds of millions of dollars of our money to Planned Parenthood?

Like many of you, I was dismayed when Congress voted a few weeks ago to pass a stopgap funding bill that continues to fund Planned Parenthood for another year. That means, another half a billion in taxpayer dollars will be sent to America's #1 abortion provider.

Clearly, we must do much more to hold our legislators accountable, and to demonstrate just how serious we are about our demands that Congress defund Planned Parenthood. More also needs to be done to educate ordinary citizens about just how destructive Planned Parenthood is, and why they too should be clamoring for taxpayer funding to cease.

Fortunately, one big opportunity to do both of these things is just over a week away.

The third annual National Day of Prayer and Protest Against Planned Parenthood is scheduled to take place on Saturday, April 28. Over 118 Planned Parenthood protests have been scheduled in 35 states at various Planned Parenthood facilities (find a list of locations here). There's still time to organize more Planned Parenthood protests, so if there isn't one in your area, why not volunteer to organize one? My hope is that pro-lifers will prayerfully witness outside every single Planned Parenthood in the country come April 28.

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March for Life, 2018.

The Evil Behind the Veneer

This year's Planned Parenthood protests come in the wake of its unveiled plans to push to expand what it calls “reproductive health & rights” in all 50 states. But just like Planned Parenthood's cheerful pink branding and slick marketing materials, these words simply disguise the true horror of Planned Parenthood's aims, and how rotten the organization is, to the very core.

It's amazing how most people still don't know that Planned Parenthood emerged directly out of the brutal early 20th century eugenics movement, and how many of its original officers and supporters were self-avowed eugenicists.

I could write a whole book on the atrocious things that Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger said about racial minorities, the poor and the disabled. Like the speech she gave in 1921 in which she stated that the unbalance in birth rate between what she called the “fit” and the “unfit” is “the greatest present menace to civilization.” Or that the “most urgent problem today” is “to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” Talk about a reason to join the Planned Parenthood protests.

Tell Congress to keep their promise and defund Planned Parenthood. Sign the petition here!

Nowadays, Planned Parenthood supporters fall all over each other trying to explain why Sanger wasn't really a racist, socially elitist eugenicist. But how else can they explain the fact that she agreed at one point to speak to a KKK rally? Or how can they possibly soften Sanger's statement that those with hereditary diseases must only be permitted to marry if they consent to being sterilized? Or that any parents who have given birth to children with diseases shouldn't have any more kids? Or that parenthood should be viewed as “a privilege, not a right” in which the state should be involved?

But it wasn't just Sanger. Planned Parenthood's leadership was riddled from the get-go with leading eugenicists. Like Henry P. Fairchild, a vice president of Planned Parenthood, who was also a past president of the American Eugenics Society.  Or, Samuel W. Anderson, also a member of the American Eugenics Society who served on Planned Parenthood's Board of Directors. Or CP Blacker, who was secretary to the Eugenics Society as well as vice chairman of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

The list goes on and on…

Maybe that helps explain why the majority of PP facilities in the U.S. are in poor and minority neighborhoods. And maybe that in turn also helps explain why a hugely disproportionate number of abortions in the U.S. occur among poor and minority populations.

For Sanger and many top Planned Parenthood executives, Planned Parenthood's mission wasn't to find ways to alleviate poverty and eradicate disease, but rather to find ways to eradicate those who are poor, and those who are weak.

Planned Parenthood: Eliminating, not Assisting the Poor and Weak

That is still Planned Parenthood's mission. They've just gotten a lot better at branding.

Margaret Sanger's preferred method of eliminating poverty was to prevent the poor and weak from ever coming into existence via contraception. Things are tidier that way. Sanger even sometimes expressed misgivings about abortion, arguing that it could be harmful to the mother's health, and that abortion was “the very worst way” to reduce the population. Before Planned Parenthood was called Planned Parenthood, it was the Birth Control League.

A lot of people (even some who call themselves “pro-life”) still argue that if only Planned Parenthood would only stop doing abortions, it would be a good organization, because of its other “reproductive health services.”

You'd think we'd know better by now.

In the first place, we have tons of evidence that Planned Parenthood and its supporters greatly exaggerate its non-abortion and non-contraception-related services. In 2014, for instance, Planned Parenthood committed 323,000 abortions, but made just 2,000 adoption referrals, while the rate of adoption referrals has dropped 59 percent since 2007. In fact, most of Planned Parenthood's non-abortion services have taken a massive nosedive in recent years.Abortions, on the other hand, keep going up. And as far as those life-saving “mammograms” that so many Planned Parenthood's celebrity supporters love to talk about? Planned Parenthood doesn't actually do any of them. None. Zero.

But more to the point, Planned Parenthood has been handing out contraception like candy for nearly a century now, and instead of ending abortion, abortion rates skyrocketed. This is the deadly logic of the contraceptive mentality. As it turns out, the only thing that widespread access to contraception does is unmoor sexuality from marriage, responsibility, and the biological purpose of sexuality. Once that is done – as Blessed Pope Paul VI prophetically warned us in Humanae Vitae – all hell breaks loose: more unplanned pregnancies, more abortions, more women being exploited for their bodies, more infidelity, more marriages falling apart, more children living in broken homes, more fatherless children, more pornography, more STDs, more broken hearts, and more broken bodies.

Selling Cyanide

How much more evidence do we need that Planned Parenthood's model of “charity” isn't working? If Planned Parenthood wanted to make abortion “safe, legal and rare,” they would long ago have realized that the only reliable method of doing so is to educate people in responsibility, and to strengthen families.

Instead, Planned Parenthood is hell-bent on finding new ways to market sexual libertinism to our culture, with a focus on our youth through its graphic sex-ed programs – thereby ensuring they have a steady stream of new customers for their government-subsidized contraception, and for the lucrative abortions needed to clean up the mess when the contraception fails (as it so often does).

But, then again, why would Planned Parenthood re-evaluate its methods, given how much money it rakes in every year?

It's easy living for Planned Parenthood and its employees, thanks to the half a billion dollars of our tax dollars, the $190 million dollars in abortion-related revenue per year, and the hundreds of millions more that they receive from liberal foundations and wealthy celebrities. Planned Parenthood's former CEO Cecile Richards was being paid nearly $1 million per year at the time she retired, and their executives are paid an average of nearly $400,000. And yet somehow, we're supposed to believe that they need our taxpayer funding.

Especially in the wake of the nauseating baby parts scandal, which exposed the darkest, inhuman underbelly of the abortion organization, there is simply no reason for any politician to vote to give our money to Planned Parenthood, or for any ordinary citizen – pro-abortion or pro-life – to view Planned Parenthood with anything but unmitigated disgust.

That Planned Parenthood still has the prominence and social credibility that it does is an embarrassment to our country. Fortunately, there are pro-life individuals and organizations doing incredible work to unmask Planned Parenthood. Even if you can't devote your whole life to this important work, you can contribute in important ways. We need more: sidewalk counselors, prayer warriors, advocates, volunteers at the pregnancy help centers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and social workers all donating their time in the defense and service of Life.

I sincerely hope that you will visit the website for the Protest Planned Parenthood day and make every effort to attend your local demonstration. The small but powerful minority defending and advocating for Planned Parenthood prospers because of the silent majority's unwillingness to get involved. Together, let's unmask Planned Parenthood and end its violent assault upon women, nascent life, the family, and society.

Published with permission from Human Life International.