This week, America’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, will surpass the $30 million mark in money spent to influence this year’s political cycle. With the American taxpayer forced to subsidize nearly half of its $1.3 billion annual budget, it’s hard not to view the abortion conglomerate as a taxpayer-funded super PAC devoted to electing pro-abortion Democrats that pledge to divert even more taxpayer money into their coffers.
At a Planned Parenthood event earlier this year, a crowd cheered in agreement when the corporation’s president, Cecile Richards, said, “For 100 years, Planned Parenthood has allowed people to live out their dreams — and largely because women can now access birth control and legal abortion.”
But it’s a lie. Dreams are not achieved by denying reality – in this case, the reality of life in the womb. Dreams are not achieved by seeing the powerful ability of a woman’s body to bring life into the world as a disease to be eradicated, or the tiny life once conceived as a cancer to be cut out. Dreams also cannot be built on violence — especially not a violence that pits a woman against her child at its most dependent stage. Women’s autonomy — and our realized dreams — are not won through the killing of our children. As Mother Teresa has said, “It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
Planned Parenthood claims that human pregnancy — if unwanted — does not involve human children. But logic and science prove otherwise. It is not difficult to see life inside the womb — one has only to view an ultrasound, or look up websites like babycenter.com or ehd.org, or marvel with millions at viral videos like this one. Human life begins as the single-cell embryo, with its own complete, unique DNA, a life that only needs time and nourishment to grow. A recent study even suggests the beating of the child’s heart begins as early as 16 days after conception.
Everyone knows abortion takes a human life — it is a tragic loss even to some abortionists.
Some provide burial services or “memorial tokens” for surviving parents who can’t help but grieve. Presidential contender Hillary Clinton, a nearly unparalleled proponent of abortion-on-demand, stated once that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Why is the “rare” necessary, if there is no human cost, no loss? Baby showers are thrown for preborn babies — not for “potential lives” or “clumps of cells.”
Decades of misinformation campaigns and hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing can attempt to package abortion in the language of empowerment or compassion. Planned Parenthood can publicize its abortion corporation as a women’s health-care clinic. In public, Richards and her allies in media and politics falsely claim that abortion only makes up three percent of its business — and instead emphasize the chain’s cancer screenings and “women’s health-care” services.
But Planned Parenthood’s own numbers prove it’s a corporation focused on abortion, not on women’s health care. One out of every eight of its clients annually will undergo an abortion. Planned Parenthood doesn’t perform a single mammogram, and performs less than two percent of all women’s cancer screenings — manual breast exams and pap smears — in the United States. Yet it commits over 30 percent of America’s abortions.
Planned Parenthood is the single largest abortion chain in America, committing 887 abortions a day and over 320,000 abortions last year alone. Abortion is also the most often proposed “solution” for pregnant women at Planned Parenthood: An “unwanted pregnancy” at Planned Parenthood is 160 times more likely to lead to abortion than to adoption. Put another way: For every 160 children who are aborted, only one child is referred for adoption.
But the deception doesn’t end with misleading abortion statistics. For nearly ten years, our team at Live Action has investigated Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. During our investigations, we exposed Planned Parenthood facilitating the sexual exploitation of minors and covering up human trafficking. We’ve watched as Planned Parenthood deceptively counseled women with false medical information to convince them to have abortions to boost its bottom line. We’ve seen Planned Parenthood promote child sexual abuse, dangerous sex advice to children, and gendercide.
We’ve already seen — and will continue to see over the next twelve months — some media groups celebrating Planned Parenthood. What their stories will leave out is the lives lost, the women suffering from abortions in their past, or the grief of siblings missing siblings.
Planned Parenthood’s 100th anniversary does not warrant celebration, but instead deep reflection. Is this the America we want? Can we achieve social justice, care better for our children, respect women, and foster healthy families and communities if every year, a fourth of preborn children in America are killed by legal abortion?
As we reject the celebration of violence against our children, let us also work together for positive solutions to the challenges women and children face. Together, we can work to improve maternity leave and maternal health care, destigmatize unplanned pregnancy, and support families raising children in our communities. Together, we can acknowledge and support the thousands of pregnancy care centers quietly and confidentially serving women facing unplanned pregnancies, the millions of adoptive parents inviting new life into their homes, and the brave single mothers working hard to support themselves and their children. These quiet champions — and all who work to protect and improve the lives of our fellow humans — are worth celebrating.
Whether politically left or right, Republican or Democrat, regardless of background or religion, we must rally together and promote the dignity of every human life. We can turn a new page as a society, and reject the violence and lies of the past. One hundred years from now, let’s joyfully celebrate a century of lives and dreams fostered, not destroyed.
