As our Zach Evans reports this morning, Planned Parenthood has just announced a $45 million ad campaign for the coming election cycle, targeting battleground states in an effort to defeat President Trump and Republican senators.
The campaign will consist of mail, television, radio, and digital-media advertisements, focused on Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina. All three states have a Senate race with a somewhat vulnerable incumbent GOP senator up for reelection (Martha McSally (Ariz.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), and Richard Burr (N.C.)).
The announcement of this advertising campaign — while wholly unsurprising given Planned Parenthood’s past record of expending millions of dollars to assist Democratic candidates every election cycle — offers an occasion to recall that the group is not merely an anodyne women’s health-care provider, as its executives and defenders routinely insist.
It was a disagreement over political strategy, after all, that got Leana Wen ousted from her job as Planned Parenthood’s CEO this summer. Wen, a physician who served most recently as health commissioner in Baltimore, had been under the impression that Planned Parenthood had hired her to expand its health-care footprint, not lead a political-action campaign in support of the Democratic party. The group’s board evidently had other ideas.
Even aside from the stark reality that abortion isn’t health care (“health care” is traditionally understood as an effort to heal rather than to kill), it isn’t difficult to discern that our nation’s supposedly benevolent chain of women’s-health clinics is in fact committed primarily to protecting and expanding its ability to perform a procedure that plumps up the bottom line.
This aggressive political-spending effort to unseat politicians who would remove Planned Parenthood’s annual half a billion in federal funding and undertake further efforts to protect unborn human life is just the latest example.