Former NBC and CNN news anchor Campbell Brown penned a New York Times op ed over the weekend entitled, “Planned Parenthood’s self-destructive behavior.”
With such a favorable title, pro-lifers might be tempted to glam on to Brown as one of us. Not so fast.
Before lodging her complaint against Planned Parenthood, Campbell first gave it kudos. She promoted the United States’ largest abortion provider as really not being about that, stating, “Most of Planned Parenthood’s work focuses on health care for low-income women, things like screenings for breast cancer and diabetes, and family planning.”
To back up that claim Campbell parroted Planned Parenthood’s line that “abortions represent only 3 percent of its work,” when in actuality about 10% of Planned Parenthood clients get abortions, according to FactCheck.org, and 38.4% of its clinic income comes from abortion, according to Live Action.
Campbell also acknowledged in her piece she is pro-abortion.
So what was her gist? That Planned Parenthood has morphed into an arm of the Democrat Party, to its detriment:
Planned Parenthood has a large target on its back. At no time in the organization’s history has it faced such a concerted Congressional challenge to its agenda. But most worrisome is the organization’s shrinking number of defenders, and Planned Parenthood has only itself to blame. It has adopted a strategy driven by blind partisanship, electing to burn bridges instead of building them. That strategy is damaging, and possibly imperiling, its mission.
It helps to know Brown has an affinity to the GOP. Her husband, Dan Senor (pictured right), is a Republican who served in the George W. Bush administration and is currently an adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign as well as a Fox News contributor. Brown also recently wrote another NYT piece favorable to Republicans.
Add her political leaning to the fact she supports abortion, and there are two possible reasons why Brown wrote her piece:
- Brown had no ulterior motive. She was simply attempting to woo Planned Parenthood back to the pro-abortion GOP fold. She was giving advice as a friend.
- Brown was subliminally signaling Planned Parenthood’s Republican donors that they are aiding and abetting the enemy. This was apparently Planned Parenthood’s take on her op ed, because in response it sent the following statement to Politico:
Planned Parenthood has millions of Republican donors and volunteers because our mission is consistent with Republican values such as individual responsibility and personal freedom. Planned Parenthood works in a bipartisan way with public policy makers at every level to insure women the best health care possible. We have a long history of Republican support and will continue to reach out to Republicans who support us and our programs. That doesn’t mean we can’t do better in recognizing the extraordinary effort it takes in the current political climate for Republican office holders to protect us from harm and advocate for our programs.
Another theory, posited by a pro-abort at NJ.com:
So why did Brown write her deceptive op-ed? Parading as a pro-choice journalist her job is to defame Planned Parenthood while shoring up independent and moderate Republican support for Romney….
And why would the New York Times even print Brown’s op-ed? Perhaps it’s because the paper desperately searches for moderate Republicans, like Brown, who don’t sound completely insane….
Actually, pro-lifers have the same conundrum as Planned Parenthood. We want to be bipartisan, but the fact remains it is the Republican Party with the pro-life platform, it is the Republican Party with pro-lifers in leadership, it is Republicans who forward pro-life legislation, and it is Republicans who want to defund Planned Parenthood.
All the opposite holds true for the Democrat Party. And when stakes were the highest, it was Democrat pro-lifers who betrayed us and ushered in Obamacare.
Certainly Republicans claiming to be pro-life betray us, too, but the odds are obviously much greater that preborn babies stand a better chance of surviving with the GOP in power.
But back to Campbell’s theory that PP “imperils” itself by resting it fortunes with the Democrat Party. I reported in 2010 that all 226 of Planned Parenthood Action’s endorsed House and Senate candidates that year were Democrats. In retrospect, a lot of good that did PP. Democrats went on to lose the House and come nearer to losing the Senate majority.
Just look at all the gains made in the states since 2010.
In a sense this all becomes a grand political game of survival of the fittest.
Planned Parenthood really has nowhere to go. If it spreads its assets to the Republican Party it strengthens the GOP’s numbers, which in general bode well for pro-lifers. GOP majorities mean GOP committee chairmanships, GOP-picked legislation, and GOP-picked judges (again, not perfectly chosen, but in general better than Democrat choices).
By adding GOP members to its dance card, PP also risks losing favor with the Democrat Party, which may otherwise decide it is better off abandoning the pro-abortion platform as the loser it is. If PP fails to hand over money and votes, this becomes a certainty.
Which party is growing stronger by the stand on abortion it takes? Gallup polls since 2009 and the 2010 election indicate the pro-life political position is slowly but surely triumphing.
You can’t look around a room and tell who was conceived with wine and roses and who was conceived on a street corner. 
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.