In a political career notable for failure, she’s never failed to champion abortion.
Planned Parenthood announced last week that it will honor former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with the group’s first-ever “Champion of the Century” award. The organization will host a number of events this year to commemorate the centennial year of its founding in October 1916. Among those events will be a gala — “100 Years Strong: The Celebration of a Century” — held on May 2 in New York City.
According to Planned Parenthood’s press release, the gala will honor Clinton “for her 40 years of service to women and girls in this country.” At the same event, the group will present its “Champion of Change” award to producer Shonda Rhimes “for revolutionizing the way women and issues of reproductive health — including safe, legal abortion — are portrayed on television.”
This refers to Rhimes’s work as creator and producer of the television show Scandal, which in 2015 featured a scene depicting the show’s main character undergoing an onscreen abortion while the Christmas song “Silent Night” played in the background. (The abortion itself was not pictured graphically; the camera focused on the character’s face as the procedure occurred.)
These two awards are merely the latest proof that Planned Parenthood is not, in fact, an innocent defender of “women’s rights.” Nor is it a “pro-choice” organization that exists to give American women an array of health-care options. Planned Parenthood is an abortion corporation that seeks every possible opportunity to glorify abortion and deify the public figures who push for total access to government-funded abortion-on-demand.
Clinton — who has already received Planned Parenthood’s “Margaret Sanger” award, named after the group’s eugenicist founder — has done little of note throughout her long and unsuccessful political career to “serve” American women and children, but she has always been a prominent and staunch supporter of abortion. And the love goes both ways: Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards stumped for Clinton’s campaign across the country in 2016, and her organization’s political-action arms donated around $38 million to Democratic candidates at all levels in the last election cycle.
In return for this support, Clinton as the Democratic nominee oversaw the horrifying decision to alter her party’s platform, adopting the most pro-abortion policy stance the party has ever taken. The revised Democratic platform endorses the full repeal of the Hyde Amendment — which bans the direct taxpayer funding of abortion — and calls for the repeal of all federal and state policies that impede abortion in any way, including abortions through the last week of pregnancy In fact, in the final debate of the presidential election, Clinton categorically defended late-term abortion, using a disingenuous definition “women’s health” to justify partial-birth procedures.
Neither Planned Parenthood nor its “Champion of the Century” is committed to protecting or serving women and girls. Though the group claims to offer women an array of health-care choices, it has grossly exaggerated its commitment to providing prenatal care, which in fact is almost entirely unavailable at its clinics. Planned Parenthood continues to assert that abortion is a mere 3 percent of its services, even though that inaccurate statistic has been debunked numerous times, including by left-leaning outlets such as Slate and the Washington Post.
The company’s leadership has routinely and falsely claimed that its clinics offer mammograms, though they have never done so. The group provides less than 1 percent of the nation’s Pap tests and less than 2 percent of its breast exams and cancer screenings, while performing 325,000 abortions annually, about one-third of the abortions performed in the U.S. each year. Planned Parenthood clinics are outnumbered across the country by federally qualified health-care clinics by a ratio of 20 to 1, and these alternative clinics actually provide women an extensive array of health-care options.
Planned Parenthood provides less than 1 percent of the nation’s Pap tests and less than 2 percent of its breast exams and cancer screenings, while performing 325,000 abortions annually.
Planned Parenthood was recently subject to a 15-month congressional investigation, which uncovered extensive evidence that the group has been involved in the illegal trafficking of the body parts of aborted babies, for which the group apparently received monetary compensation. It has been referred by Congress to both federal and local law-enforcement agencies for further investigation.
Meanwhile, as Planned Parenthood takes the time to plan its fancy gala and hand out unmerited awards, it has yet to produce an annual financial report for the 2015–16 fiscal year. This, while the group continues to accept half a billion dollars of taxpayer money from the federal government each year. What’s more, several reports indicate that some of the group’s affiliates have engaged in possible Medicaid fraud to cover up use of this public funding to directly facilitate abortion procedures.
There is no doubt that Clinton richly deserves this award, as she has long been a public champion for Planned Parenthood, sanctioning the murder of thousands of children and forcing unwilling Americans to pay for it. But as information continues to surface about the abortion group’s illegal activity and public deceptions, it becomes increasingly evident that neither Clinton nor Planned Parenthood is a true champion of women and children. One can only hope that, in the fullness of time, Planned Parenthood’s disgracefully propped-up fortunes take the same disastrous turn as did Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.
— Alexandra DeSanctis is a National Review Institute William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism.
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