The End of My Planned Parenthood

M y Planned Parenthood is closing. It’s been put on the market. The asking price is $39 million. In truth, there is no price tag to capture the infinite worth of the lives that have been lost there. Lives were ended. Hearts were broken. Immiseration was compounded.

My Planned Parenthood was once named after Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. For decades, many on the right pointed out that the woman was a eugenicist — she wanted to eliminate black and brown and poor babies. Some of those who have signed onto that legacy may have had the best of intentions. But you’re likely aware of what is said about the road to hell and good intentions. In the case of Planned Parenthood, it wasn’t just a matter for individual conscience. That grave thinking infected our culture in both the most intimate and the most public ways. Hillary Clinton was among those to receive Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, for her commitment to legal abortion in all three trimesters of pregnancy. All three trimesters was what Roe v. Wade — may it rest in peace — was about, even though polling consistently demonstrated that Americans did not quite realize that what the U.S. Supreme Court imposed on us was that radical.

Margaret Sanger’s name was removed from my Planned Parenthood in 2020, because Black Lives Matter, we were told — even if they really don’t to Planned Parenthood, if they were unborn. The accusation of their founder’s racism got to be overwhelming even for the political powerhouse that is Planned Parenthood. It took longer, but they managed to get the City of New York to remove the street sign that designated the corner of Bleecker and Mott Streets in Lower Manhattan as Margaret Sanger Square. Both moves were mere window dressing. You could say lipstick on a pig, but the late Cecile Richards, who was the face of Planned Parenthood for more than the dozen years she spent at its helm, was beautiful. I once sat across from her on the Amtrak Acela train between New York and D.C., and she was a magnet for people, as she was recognized and seemed to delight her entourage. There is something seductive about abortion, especially when it is wrapped in euphemisms about empowerment and freedom — goods for women. Less of a topic of discussion are the deaths and the pain. Grieving needs to happen when a mother loses a child. But it’s often not allowed when there is an abortion. It’s a mere health-care choice, after all, women are told.

One day, very early into my time spent in front of the flagship Planned Parenthood in New York, I felt like I was being hit by a bulldozer as a young woman was leaving the clinic after an abortion, looking like life had been sucked out of her. I wasn’t even thinking of what had just happened when that reality was undeniably present on Bleecker Street, as her boyfriend was holding her up, trying to keep her on her feet and walking, albeit slowly. She was depleted. She didn’t look like she wanted to live. She knew she had just ended the life of her baby. A mother knows, whatever the societal talking points are, whatever was said to her in the clinic.

It was my Planned Parenthood because I spent way too much time outside it — nearly daily for a time. I mentioned the pain that was evident on the streets outside the clinic. So was anger. People would pray outside. Usually we were quiet about it — praying the Rosary silently or in a group aloud, across the street. But there were some rogue actors and those of temperamental and ecumenical varieties who would preach, even mentioning hell. It’s not my cup of tea, and, again, not for most of the people who would plead with God to bring an end to abortions, and for healing. I saw many things, but the man who threw a pickle jar from his apartment window down the block at an Evangelical loudly proclaiming Scripture was a bit of an outlier. He missed the young man and hit the car of an innocent person who happened to have parked on that block, smashing his front window. I didn’t manage to stick around to see the driver discover the news, but it is quite possible he never found out why there was a jar of pickles in his car.

At least it was only pickles. My Planned Parenthood was the place where I saw, for the first time, the routine process of dead babies leaving an abortion-clinic building. A medical-waste truck would show up, more than once a week, and take boxes and boxes and boxes . . . in empty, to fill with the remains of life. I sobbed the first time the boxes passed right by me. I broke my rule. If I wasn’t sidewalk counseling — offering a friendly word to women and girls going into the clinic about alternatives to abortion — I would always stay across the street. I didn’t want to be accused of obstruction or coercion. But I needed to be close to those boxes — those babies who would never be memorialized. Who never had a chance to live the life they were created for and to be the apple of their mothers’ eyes.

One day, I thought myself a complete failure (not an uncommon occurrence ) because a 17-year-old girl who didn’t want an abortion but was being pressured into it — a common story — went through with it. Months later, she wound up at the same place, pregnant again. By the grace of God, someone in the clinic described the later-term abortion that would happen to her. (The first abortion was earlier in the pregnancy, by pill.) When she heard that the baby’s heart would be stopped, she fled. She got in contact with some of the others who had previously offered to help, and she has a little girl now. Seeds were planted. Miracles happen.

One of those miracles could be the closing of my Planned Parenthood. So much prayer has gone into seeing this day. Abortions are far from over in New York, known as the abortion capital of the world. But this landmark won’t be, and that’s a post-Roe milestone. Pro-life outreach must be more creative and wholistic going forward. It won’t be at the same address, but prayer will follow where the women and girls — and their babies — are. Because they deserve better, and we owe them more than pressure to end the lives of their unborn children.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.