Not all women were welcome at the Women’s March on Washington yesterday in our nation’s capital. In an astounding contradiction, the March excluded pro-life women. Those who did attend attacked efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and defended the right to kill unborn children by abortion.
At the end of the play “Our Town” Thorton Wilder reflects on the magnificence of life, and people’s limited ability to fully appreciate it. Wilder questions, “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” The narrator answers, “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.” No saints advocate for abortion. To the contrary, the saints have gone to great lengths to proclaim the sanctity of human life—just study the words and actions of St. Teresa of Calcutta and St. Gianna Molla. And on the value of human life, the organizers of the Women’s March fail as a poet.
First, funding Planned Parenthood funds abortion. In defense of their support of the abortion goliath Planned Parenthood, many appallingly cite the debunked and misleading claim that abortion only accounts for 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services. Even the alt-left website Slate.com characterizes this claim as “the most meaningless abortion statistic ever . . . to the point of being downright silly.” Both the New York Post and Live Action published devastating critiques of this figure, and the Washington Post exposed the lie with three Pinocchios indicating “significant factual error.” In the latest year to have been reported on alone, Planned Parenthood performed a total of 327,653 abortions (i.e., 1/3 of the nation’s abortions).
Yet still, Planned Parenthood advocates contend that its resources go to women’s health needs such as mammograms, cancer screenings, and pre-natal care and that Planned Parenthood is in dire need of your donations. More Pinocchios. The most recently reported data from the organization itself shows that Planned Parenthood obtained annual revenue after expenses of $127 billion dollars and had net assets greater than $1.4 billion dollars. And the non-profit’s 990 filed with the IRS reports that its CEO’s salary and compensation totaled just under $1 million.
Credible reports reveal that Planned Parenthood’s focus is not pre-natal services, oncology, or cancer screenings. Indeed, Planned Parenthood does not even perform mammograms. The FDA’s comprehensive list of all licensed mammography centers in the country includes no Planned Parenthood clinics, not even one. Moreover, the number of abortions Planned Parenthood performed increased over the last ten years. During this same time period, the number of adoption services and prenatal services it provided significantly decreased.
Women deserve high quality health care. Over 13,000 federally qualified health centers currently provide women with high quality healthcare at no cost or low cost. With all this high quality care available, no reason exists for taxpayers to specially support Planned Parenthood, especially given its wicked past.
Planned Parenthood’s depraved history includes repeatedly failing to report sexual abuse of minor children. As recent as last week the National Review reaffirmed the organization’s continued failure to report evidence of child sex-trafficking.
Next there’s the racist history of Planned Parenthood, beginning with the reality that an unapologetic bigot, Margaret Sanger, created the organization. Sanger notoriously spoke to the KKK, and other white supremacy groups, where she promoted killing preborn immigrants and minorities. She infamously said “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” Many supporters of the organization eschew this reality by saying those statements were several years old and misconstrued. Just a couple years ago, however, an undercover investigation exposed Planned Parenthood agreeing to accept funds for the specific purpose of killing a black baby:
Donor: Ok. So—so the abortion could—could be—you know, I could give money specifically for a black baby, that would—that’d be the purpose.
Planned Parenthood: Yeah, absolutely. Um, if you wanted to designate that you wanted your gift to be used to help an African-American woman in need, um, then we would certainly, uh, make sure that that gift was earmarked specifically for that purpose.
Donor: Great. Because I really face trouble with affirmative action, and I don’t want my kids being disadvantaged, you know, against, um, black kids. I just had a baby, I want to put it in his name, you know.
Planned Parenthood: Absolutely, that’s fantastic.
Donor: So that’s—that’s definitely possible?
Planned Parenthood: Oh, always, always.
Donor: You know, we just think, you know the—the—the less—the less black kids out there, the better.
Planned Parenthood: [laughs] Understandable, understandable.
Disturbingly, Planned Parenthood strategically locates their “clinics” in and near minority communities, leading to the statistic that pre-born black sons and black daughters are aborted at a significantly higher rate than other races. Aleveda King, the niece of the civil rights legend Martin Luther King, Jr., decries: “The most obvious practitioner of racism in the United States today is Planned Parenthood.” Ironically, while the Women’s March on Washington asserts support for women regardless of a woman’s race, ethnicity, immigration status, etc., Planned Parenthood continues to target minorities, single mothers, and immigrants, along with their unborn daughters and sons.
The science of the human development is unavoidable. At the moment of conception, the pre-born child has an individually unique DNA. This unique genetic make-up has never existed before, and will never be repeated. This life is unique, and no one else will ever be exactly like this person. At three weeks into development, the child’s heart beats. At seven weeks, the child begins moving independently. At nine weeks, the child’s unique set of fingerprints form. At ten weeks, the child responds to touch. At twenty weeks, the child feels pain.
Planned Parenthood, and the Woman’s March on Washington, advertise abortion as “reproductive healthcare.” The euphemism disingenuously leads people into thinking that abortion magically makes a woman “unpregnant.” But, abortion affects women after they have reproduced and have created a child in their womb. It is not a magic pill or procedure to reverse time. If it were, the result would not be human remains.
Abortion clinics fret over how to dispose of the body parts, organs, and remains of the pre-born. Watching the entirety of the videos created by the Center for Medical Progress, one cannot help but think about the byproduct of abortion. The videos and photographs published by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform display abortion’s tragic reality. The testimony of abortion survivors, such as Claire Culwell and Josiah Presley, shatter the abortion industry’s “blob of cells” characterization of life. With the advancements in science and the expanded sharing of information, it continues to get harder to deny the reality that abortion ends human life.
A few years ago, a writer at Salon.com expressed that she knew abortion killed a human life, but simply did not care because “All life is not equal.” Humans should care about treating all human life equally and with dignity.
We cannot pretend to care about human life unless we care about the mother and her child equally. Abortion pins mother against child. One person decides he/she cannot co-exist in this world with the other person. In abortion, the mother decides to eliminate the child. Yet, her son or daughter is a non-combatant. The only person armed is the abortionist. The son or daughter does not consent, has no one to negotiate his/her position, possesses no weapon, and is entirely defenseless. Maybe one day mothers will realize that the world is big enough for both them and their child.
But saying that Planned Parenthood’s killing is “healthcare,” or that abortion is a solution without bloodshed, is a lie. Those who perpetuate this lie have had their march. Their march does not change the truth.
By Erin Mersino with William Wagner. Erin is Senior Counsel at the Great Lakes Justice Center. William Wagner is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law and President of Salt & Light Global
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