Planned Parenthood believes your money should be used to help poor women get abortions. That, and not those Live Action “gotcha” videos, is the real scandal involving the organization whose official name is the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or PPFA for short. And, unlike what happened when Live Action sent a man posing as a pimp to get some misguided or misinformed PPFA staffer to agree to help underage girls get abortions, this is a scandal the organization can’t deny. The official PPFA position is posted on its Web site. The folks at PPFA were upset last year that President Obama’s 2010 budget “does not remove government funding restrictions on abortions.” In other words, the taxpayers’ wallets should be open whenever any indigent woman, anywhere, for any reason, wants an abortion.
Here’s more from the 2010 PPFA statement on restrictions on government funding for abortion:
“Restrictions on public funding for abortion services have severely hindered access to safe abortion care for women, disproportionately affecting poor women.”
If there were an award for the Orwellian misuse and abuse of the English language, the above sentence would win hands down. Abortion, in which a living but unborn child is sucked out of a woman’s uterus, isn’t the taking of a human life, but a “service.”
It’s not killing; it’s “care.” And the people who run Live Action think they need a “gotcha” video to discredit PPFA?
Somewhere Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, must be smiling at the sentence about public funding. That would be only appropriate, since she had views about eugenics and compulsory sterilization that would make any good Nazi proud.
The folks who run PPFA today may or may not know that history about Sanger. I’m not implying they’re Nazis or believe in either eugenics or compulsory sterilization.
But they have clearly stubbed their toes on the public funding for abortion issue. Here’s why:
Way back in 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down one of the worst rulings in its history with the Roe v. Wade decision, the argument Norma McCorvey’s lawyers used was that state laws outlawing abortions violated a woman’s “right to privacy.” The language so-called pro-choicers use these days — “a woman’s right to choose” — didn’t exist.
The seven justices who voted on Jan. 22, 1973, to strike down every anti-abortion statute in the land went rooting around in the “penumbra” of the Constitution and yanked out the “right to privacy.”
The government, the justices and so-called pro-choicers said they had no business poking its nose into the private affairs of any woman who wanted an abortion. But when it came to poor women who perhaps couldn’t afford safe, legal abortions, so-called pro-choicers didn’t just want to move the goal posts; they didn’t just want to change playing fields; they wanted to switch to another game entirely, with a whole new set of rules.
Public funding should be used for poor women to have abortions, so-called pro-choicers said, because, well, they were poor. And every right-to-lifer in the land should respond with, “So your point is what, exactly?”
Here’s the tricky thing about privacy: it’s really about keeping things private. If a woman’s decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business, then abortion advocates really shouldn’t run around demanding that government funding – public money – be made available for those abortions. In other words, public money shouldn’t be used to terminate a pregnancy, which abortion advocates themselves would have to admit is the result of what should be the ultimate act of privacy.
