Planned Parenthood was founded 100 years ago today in Brooklyn, N.Y. Its century of history is worth looking at, for the public can be forgiven for confusion between the organization liberals celebrate for providing essential services for women, and the scandal-ridden eugenics group that performs abortions on an industrial scale.
Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, who preached a form of social Darwinism that shaded into and helped inform the fascist movement. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit,” she said. Today, Planned Parenthood performs some 324,000 abortions a year, roughly one every two minutes, disproportionately on black women and their unborn babies.
Planned Parenthood clinics have been implicated in covering up statutory rape, Medicaid fraud and the targeting of babies for abortion based on race and sex. Last year, a pro-life undercover group produced a series of videos containing substantial proof that clinics broke federal law by harvesting the body parts of aborted babies for profit.
That scandal continues, even as you read this. Just this week, the district attorney in Orange County, Calif., sued two human tissue companies for profiting from fetal tissue. It was Planned Parenthood that provided the tissue.
It makes this inhumane business even more repugnant that Planned Parenthood receives $500 million a year from taxpayers through Medicaid, Title X family planning and government grants. As scandals have mounted in recent years, private donors have turned away from Planned Parenthood, but the federal government has given it more cash to make up the shortfall.
Despite a record and continued practice that should make all decent people gag with disgust, Planned Parenthood continues to enjoy unflinching support from Democrats. Indeed, unwavering, unnuanced and unreflective acceptance of abortion and its principal practitioner is now a litmus test for acceptability in the party of the Left. And this year both presidential candidates admire the group.
President Obama is seen by many as supporting abortion more than any of his 43 predecessors. But Planned Parenthood is even more excited about Hillary Clinton. Dawn Laguens, vice president of the organization’s political arm, says Hillary would be an abortion “champion” if elected. “She’s also, hands down, the strongest nominee we’ve ever seen on women’s health and rights,” Laguens said. Clinton has said she stands “in awe” of Sanger.
Donald Trump has pledged to defund the group should he win the presidency, and his running mate, Mike Pence, once fought in Congress to do so. But Trump has also said Planned Parenthood does “very good work for millions of women.”
Planned Parenthood, from its well-compensated executives to its clinic volunteers, will celebrate this week. And they will doubtless celebrate again on Nov. 9, when their champion will probably be elected to the presidency. But listen, and behind the revelry you will hear the still small voices of millions unborn, and millions more who will have their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness brutally snatched away from them.
