In the event you’ve been living under a rock or simply stopped caring about the latest progressive march in the name of a pseudo-cause, it was the “March for Science” this last weekend. The marches were primarily held in Washington, D.C., but occurred in other cities, in honor of “Earth Day,” climate change, and other sham science-related issues wrapped in the cloak of progressive causes. In this spirit, Planned Parenthood, that bastion of scientific expertise and philosophical intellect tweeted:
Bad science = bad policies. Planned Parenthood stands with the science community https://t.co/hsGRFxWmjB #marchforscience
— Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) April 22, 2017
It’s so rare that an organization like Planned Parenthood, which is often overwhelmed with the language of outrage and preoccupied with keeping up their own pretenses, should cut through the fog and shoot an arrow at the heart of the abortion debate that perpetually surrounds them, that it’s worth a second look.
What does science say about Planned Parenthood?
The most generous reading of this tweet is that Planned Parenthood has always maintained, and particularly vocally in their hearings with the House Oversight Committee in 2015 following investigations into abortion profiteering, that their primary activities are not performing abortions but providing healthcare: pap smears and the like.
This was proven to be demonstrably false. This chart shows that since 2006 (and before) healthcare provisions at Planned Parenthood have decreased, abortions have increased.
The less generous — and likely more accurate yet infinitely more complicated — reading of this attempt to correlate science with Planned Parenthood is that science supports their unspoken assertion that life does not begin at conception and therefore abortion is not only necessary, but not murder.
In 2014, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards said in an interview, “Life begins at delivery.” This is not only a convenient stance for Planned Parenthood, but an essential one: If life begins at any other time, what their organization does, the reason it exists, is no longer a pro-choice philosophy carried out in tangible reality but a moral travesty, a scientific sham, an economic bust.
When does life begin?
Yet unfortunately for Planned Parenthood, who would so like to align with the side of science (if not for kicks but to lead the way in the progressive clique), their worldview prevents them from seeing they’re wrong. It’s actually science, in fact, that prevents them from being right.
Science — not theories of science like evolution, or heck, even intelligent design — has shown over and over that life does not begin at delivery. Life begins at conception. Nevermind the concept that tennis champ Serena Williams or musician Beyonce wouldn’t be Instagramming their pregnancies if babies weren’t human at conception, but scientists have studied and found this to be the case.
Geneticist and professor at Harvard and Rutgers Universities, Ashley Montague, isn’t pro-life, but still says, “The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.”
Dr. Jerome LeJeune, professor of Genetics at the University of Descartes in Paris, discovered the chromosome pattern of Down syndrome. He testified to the Judiciary Subcommittee, “after fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being,” that this “is no longer a matter of taste or opinion” and “not a metaphysical contention; it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”
Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni, professor of pediatrics and obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania, stated, “I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception…. I submit that human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of human life…”
So in a way, Planned Parenthood is right: Bad science does equal policies. Especially when science showing life begins at conception is ignored, thus allowing organizations like Planned Parenthood to plead ignorance and continue aborting babies in the name of science.
That’s bad science and bad policy.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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