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Texas pro-lifers won big in late December when Texas Judge Gary Harger ruled that Texas can indeed exclude abortion providers from money allocated under the Texas Women’s Health Program. Of course, the largest and most profitable of the abortion providers is Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood sued, first in federal courts and then in the state. The Perry administration has now won their effort to enforce already existing Texas law and thus administer TWHP money without including Planned Parenthood.
An Associated Press story out of Austin implied that this decision would leave thousands of poor women without family planning services. According the governor’s website, 2,500 providers qualify for the TWHP money; Planned Parenthood represents only 2 percent of those providers. Further, Gov. Perry says that 80 percent of women served by the program were served by providers other than Planned Parenthood. Those who disagree with Perry regarding public funding for Planned Parenthood do not disagree with him about cancer screening or even necessarily about contraception; they disagree with him about abortion.
Planned Parenthood is behind about 25 percent of abortions in the U.S. While they are quick to say that this only represents about 11 percent of their business, it also represents three times that percentage of their revenue. Abortion is a significant revenue stream for Planned Parenthood. In Texas, their clinics would qualify for health program funding if they were not so committed, maybe dependent, on abortion. And of course that is the rub for conservatives. No one is objecting to women’s health care or counseling about services other than abortion. And of course no one is trying to discriminate against poor women. Pro-life Texans, including the governor, do not consider elective abortion to be simply a matter of women’s health. Planned Parenthood represents pro-abortion America in behaving as though abortion is the cornerstone of women’s healthcare. Abortion is the sharp and nasty end of a basic disagreement between Planned Parenthood and any recognizable biblical worldview.
Darwinist from the start
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, has been a controversial figure since early in the 20th Century. She believed that pregnancy often enslaved women, burdened families, resulted in greater poverty, and weakened the human race when the wrong people produced children. She advocated sterilization, forced in some cases, and wider use of contraception for the “unfit.” Sanger’s views make sense in light of the Darwinist theory of mankind as a naturally evolving beast. If the beast is wise enough to help evolution along by selective breeding, why not? In her day, these ideas were far more controversial than they are today. Sanger’s views of sexuality, family, and the worth of human life have been reasonably extrapolated into today’s immoral, anti-family, and anti-life agenda supported by the organization she began.
Some have noted that a high percentage, as high as three-fourths, of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in poor or minority neighborhoods. Perhaps it’s racism but it needn’t be intentionally racist to be objectionable. This could also be the outgrowth of Margaret Sanger’s ideas about eugenics—that the poor, ignorant, and unfit should be encouraged to stop bearing children. Her intent was that these people should not become pregnant. In this day, the organization that is her legacy seems more intent that children should not be born, even if education and contraception have not prevented pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood does more abortions now than they did 10 years ago; they also provide other kinds of medical services to fewer clients. Contraceptive distribution goes up, but so does the rate of unwed motherhood. The number of STD tests have gone up, but so have the rates of infection. But the main item on the menu is abortion. This is intentional, it is convictional, and it is profitable. Regardless of whether today’s Planned Parenthood has the same motives as its founder, the result has been that a much higher percentage of poor and minority babies are being aborted. To accompany this sinister trend, the rate of single motherhood, rising in all populations, is especially high in some minority communities. Contraceptives, including contraceptive abortions, focused in minority neighborhoods have not lifted families out of poverty or made the lives of poor women and children something more grand. Sanger’s vision has been a failure insofar as she intended to improve either the bloodline or the circumstances of the most vulnerable.
What about “parenthood?”
Perhaps the name of America’s largest abortion franchise is anachronistic. We have to wonder how their advocates would make the case that Planned Parenthood is in favor of “parenthood.” Some affiliates have promised underage children, any of reproductive age, to provide contraceptives if their parents will not. A PP ad in a Dallas paper promised contraceptives to underage people whose parents were “too stupid” to provide it for them. Additionally, Planned Parenthood has consistently opposed legal initiatives to honor a parent’s right to approve or even be apprised of an abortion performed on an underage child.
Is there parenthood without children? Between the time that a child is born alive and the time that child reaches puberty, Planned Parenthood devotes almost none of its attention that way. The focus is overwhelmingly on keeping a child from being born; failing that, the attention turns to discouraging women from reproducing.
Either because they are leftists or because of a “fewer births” agenda, Planned Parenthood’s website teaches young people that homosexuality and gender bending are normal. Most Americans still think this is the province of morality. Most parents prefer to teach their own kids morality, but Planned Parenthood has joined the cultural drumbeat of normalizing alternative sexual behavior, teaching kids something more sophisticated than what they might get at home. It is consistent with their message but in at least two ways contrary to any supposed commitment to “parenthood.”
But surely Planned Parenthood would favor adoption. Children conceived to women who cannot support them can be “wanted children.” Who could disagree with that? Adoptive parents are parents too. In reality, there is little reason to think that Planned Parenthood recommends adoption to pregnant clients. Ninety-eight percent of Planned Parenthood services to pregnant women recorded in the organization’s 2009 report were abortions. In that year, they provided fewer than 1,000 adoption referrals, about one-fifth as many as they provided only two years earlier. For whatever reason, adoption referral is not a priority service to pregnant women at Planned Parenthood.
Abortion & healthcare intertwined
Much of the smoke surrounding Perry’s enforcement of Texas’ law against public funding for abortion providers confuses various services provided by Planned Parenthood. That’s understandable. It is confused at several Planned Parenthood affiliate locations. Last year, the Texas Alliance for Life documented and reported multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates where the clinic using TWHP funds was under the same roof, at the same physical address as the abortion clinic also offered by the affiliate. The “separate” facilities shared the same staff, utilities, and other shared costs. In some cases this mingling clearly violated Texas law, in others it arguably did. Counselors at one side of the facility would counsel clients by referring them to the abortion facility in the next room.
Some reporters may not know how difficult it is to fund one thing at a Planned Parenthood affiliate without funding the other. There is also no indication that Planned Parenthood is moving toward “other” health services for women rather than toward more abortions. Although abortion is clearly a convictional cause for Planned Parenthood and its supporters, it is clearly also a profitable one.
Conclusion
Planned Parenthood stands against the moral teachings of the Bible. If the Bible is against abortion, Planned Parenthood is against the Bible. If the Bible warns against sexual behavior before or outside of marriage, Planned Parenthood is against the Bible. If the Bible calls homosexual behavior destructive to those who practice it and their communities, Planned Parenthood disagrees with what the Bible says. If children are a blessing from the Lord, Planned Parenthood says another thing in every way they can.
A materialistic view of mankind leads one to believe that there are no spiritual aspects to the things that people do, or to the things we do to people. There is no God who speaks to the “oughtness” of an act or to the application of a technology. If we are free to improve humanity by sterilization, targeted contraception, or even abortion as a kind of “plan C” contraception, then there is no reason that individuals can’t decide for themselves how much inconvenience they will accept for the sake of another human being. Today that inconvenient person is often a child; tomorrow it could be those who haven’t been children for many years. It is the mentality that leads to race wars or genocide. The most murderous regimes in the history of mankind were/are materialist, atheistic, and not religious as some modern writers assert. The most murderous regimes in history reasonably extrapolated the founding principles of Planned Parenthood. These principles have taken the organization far beyond Margaret Sanger’s vision but they have not taken it off the course she set.
All of us would agree that some people are ill-equipped to raise a child because of age, financial or marital status, or for some other reason. That child, once conceived, is a person who can be used of God. We’ve heard stories of great people who rose from humble means, who overcame various handicaps, people of whom few would dare say, “She shouldn’t have been born.” A child may result from foolish behavior or even a tragic crime. The child is not the tragedy. The child is not the inconvenience. It is not the growth and birth of a child that causes misfortune or a degradation of our species. The observable correlation between the increase in public funding and the number of abortions done by our nation’s largest provider leads pro-life Texans to hope that a decrease in the funding Planned Parenthood receives in Texas this year will mean fewer abortions this year.
