Harvard prof analyzes, “What’s next for Planned Parenthood?”
Harvard American history professor Jill Lepore has written a lengthy piece for The New Yorker this week entitled, “What’s next for Planned Parenthood?”
The article is informative, written from the perspective of one with a liberal bent but who is scholarly in her research and presentation. I’ve pulled excerpts of interest to pro-life activists…
“This started the day after the mid-terms,” Cecile Richards said when we met in July. Richards, the daughter of the former Texas governor Ann Richards, has been the president of Planned Parenthood since 2006. She’s long-boned and fair-haired and glamorous, and she is in the eye of a perfect political storm….
The campaign against Planned Parenthood has been unrelenting…. “We would wake up and, every day, it would be about something else,” Richards said. “Some days it was about abortion. Some days it was abortion. Some days it was about race. Some days it was about me. Some days it was about kids.”
The fury over Planned Parenthood… has nearly led to the shutdown of the federal government, required Republican Presidential nominees to swear their fealty to the pro-life lobby, tied up legislatures and courts in more than half a dozen states, launched a congressional investigation, and helped cripple the Democratic Party….
Planned Parenthood’s latest round of difficulties dates back about a year…. [A] group called Live Action… sent a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute to Planned Parenthood clinics across the country…. At the beginning of February, Live Action posted on the Internet very troubling videos….
[Planned Parenthood founder Margaret] Sanger was abrasive and impatient and often heedless. She really did court eugenicists…. But Sanger was a socialist, which often put her at odds with the eugenicists….
In the 1950s, the organization was run primarily by men interested in population control….
Most people, when they get to this chapter in American history, throw up their hands. No matter what you think of the [Roe v. Wade] ruling, what followed was awful….
“Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better,” the Times columnist David Brooks has written, insisting, “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.”…
Today, more than a quarter of all abortions conducted in the United States take place in clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood….
Planned Parenthood is both a health-care provider and a lobbyist…. Critics on both the left and the right charge that these two missions – health care and activism – are in conflict. Richards sees no conflict: “The more patients we see, the stronger advocates we have, and the stronger advocates we are, the more patients we see.”…
Americans United for Life ha[s] released a report called “The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood.” Its chief allegation is that there is a correlation between the amount of federal money Planned Parenthood receives and the number of abortions conducted in its clinics, suggesting that the funds have been treated, illegally, as fungible….
[JLS note: Richards agrees with AUL’s point. See her (underlined) inadvertent and important admission in the previous paragraph.]
Here is where we are. Republicans… made abortion a partisan issue…. but Democrats allowed their party to be defined by it. And, as long as Planned Parenthood hitches itself to the Democratic Party, and it’s hard to see what choice it has, its fortunes will rise and fall – its clinic doors will open and shut – with the power of the Party.
Much of the left, reduced to a state of timidity in the terrible, violent wake of Roe, has stopped talking about rights, poverty, decency, equality, sex, and even history, thereby ceding talk of those things to the Right….
Meanwhile, however divided the electorate may or may not be over abortion, as long as Planned Parenthood is the target the GOP stands only to gain by keeping up the attack, because a campaign against a government-funded provider of services for the poor appeals to the Tea Party….
While I agree “the GOP stands only to gain by keeping up the attack” against Planned Parenthood, Lepore’s reasoning that such an attack appeals to conservatives bent on extracting the government from helping the poor is ludicrous.
In fact, polls repeatedly show that even abortion supporters don’t want to pay for it.
Furthermore, Planned Parenthood affiliates have proven themselves corrupt. Should an organization receiving government funding be exempted from scrutiny simply because it commits abortions?
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.
Would love to get the mag and read the whole thing. Seems very well written – she stays pretty civil and nuetral and tells it how it is. Of course, these are only clips, but I’m sure the rest follows similarly.
Jill,
Were these typos in the original article?
and the number of abortions conducted in its clnics, … [clinics]
a report called “The Case for Investigating Planned Praenthood.” [Parenthood]
did more inadvertent damager to our democracy [damage]
If so, you might want to put [sic] after each one.
Thank you for all you do!
Interesting, but rather long article, which seemed to be mostly about the history of Planned Parenthood. One sentence really caught my eye, however. On page 5, the author talks about Margaret Sanger being arrested and charged with violating the section of the New York State penal code that prohibits the distribution of contraception. The author comments, in parentheses, that, “The fear was that contraception would promote promiscuity.” So glad that hasn’t happened!
Very well written, Jill
The quotes here are so good, except that the war against the poor is being waged by liberal abortion supporters. Who ends up dead? The children of poor people. Who doesn’t want poor people’s children killed, especially with government funds? Statistically: conservatives. The left is concerned with a very limited, narrow view of their solutions to poverty: socialism combined with negative eugenics. When will the ordinary folks realize they are literally sacrificing their children to a political machine?
“Who doesn’t want poor people’s children killed, especially with government funds? Statistically: conservatives”
Yet it’s the conservatives who are pushing to limit or eliminate social programs that assist poor women who do give birth. Abandoning the “babies” that are “saved” doesn’t seem very “pro-life.” ”Liberal abortion supporters” lobby for preservation of programs that provide benefits for poor families, many in the minority community which, btw, is not suffering from a drop in their fertility rate due to “genocide.” It’s not the liberals who proposed a budget with severe WIC cuts.
Hey Amber – the entire article is available at the link.
Hey Frebus – no, those are my typos. Will fix. All I had was a pdf of the article so I had to type (apparently way too sloppily) the quotes I wanted to include. Thanks.
CC: Government programs don’t alleviate poverty. I refer you to the last 50 years of our history.
CC: Government programs don’t alleviate poverty. I refer you to the last 50 years of our history
We now have about 15% of our population living in poverty due to the hideous state of the economy. Government programs such as TANF and foodstamps keep these poor people off the streets and able to feed themselves – although the homeless shelters are full and food pantries are not keeping up with the demand. Government programs do help poor families receive job training and education that helps them move up the socio-economic ladder such as it is today. Medicaid allows poor children to receive adequate health care. Subsidized child care and after school programs allow poor women to work so that they can be less poor. So while government programs don’t alleviate poverty, they do help to mitigate the effects of it.
I worked in social welfare so I am aware of poverty and what it does to people. Thanks to our programs, we had women graduating from high school and completing job training so they could get off welfare. Without government programs, the affects of poverty would be much, much worse.
CC, There is one word that explains why government programs are so ineffective at helping poor families. “subsidiarity”.
“CC, There is one word that explains why government programs are so ineffective at helping poor families. “subsidiarity”.”
So you continue to deny that government programs don’t help poor people despite the real time evidence that they do. But seriously, you, as a pro-lifer, are saying that we need to take away the government funded safety net from those women who have babies. Seriously? And why don’t you explain “subsidiarity” and how it connects, in real time, with government programs to help the poor.
Nice to see that you would have denied my relative public assistance that she used to help her get her nursing degree after her husband left her with four children – a degree that she use for a job that got her off welfare. But I guess you would deny her, and women like her, these types of assistance so that they remain in poverty.
But thanks, “truthseeker,” for validating the belief, in the liberal government program supporting pro-choice community, that those who are “pro-life” expect women to give birth and would happily abandon them after the child is born. Thanks again. Your words are very, Very instructive.
And regarding subsidiarity. That’s a Catholic term. But the Catholic church is still not lobbying for the end of welfare because they know that they could not possibly provide what the government is funding. And to give them their due, they do attempt to provide some funding for the poor. But there is NO way that they could provide income/medical assistance/food stamps/child care/educational and training programs that the state provides without which women would be in dire poverty. But is that what you want “truthseeker” – a nice, grateful, subservient underclass who are just “offering up” their suffering. And if they keep having children, when abortion is criminalized, they can give them to the church so they can be adopted. Is this what you want, Truthseeker and Courteney? What page of Charles Dickens do you live on?
Here’s a quote from Courtnay, on another thread, which is just so full of Christian pro-life charity regarding my above cited relative:
“I don’t WANT nor need the government taling care of me. Why? First of all, because I have a church that would back me up before Uncle Sam is. Plus, I married a hard-working good man who will never leave me.”
Note to Courtnay – not all women have churches that can “back” them up. And if the have churches, not all can provide the same assistance that the government does. But Courtnay actually believes that her “hard working man” will never leave her. Well, Courtnay, the reality is that men do leave. And if it’s up to you, the women should be left in poverty because they didn’t have the foresight to pick the same kind of guy that you did. Lots of women think that their men “will never leave.”
Another Courtnay gem: “Some decisions are better than others, We all have to live with the ones we made. But expecting a government program to save you from those wrong decisions is only a bad bad bad idea.”
Once again, not all women go into a relationship “expecting” the government to take care of them. But you actually don’t want the government doing that. How very “pro-life” that you expect these women to live in squalor if they don’t have a church to back them up. But you really think that if a marriage or relationship goes wrong, it’s the fault of the victim? Seriously?
And BTW, a government program enable victims of domestic violence (some who are pregnant), in my state, to stop their welfare “clock” for six months, in order that they receive government funded advocacy for their court dates and use the time for therapy. Nice to know that folks like Courtnay would deny them that. How pro-life!
What’s next for Planned Parenthood?
If only people would act and behave the right way, our civic life would match our scientifically based utopian dreams. But they won’t behave. Look at them breeding like rabbits. Those uncivilized darkies. That would not be so bad if we did not have to pay for their children to go to our schools. Well, with the desegregation and all, we cannot go back to separate but equal schools.
If we can just convince them that it is better to kill off their children before they are born, we have a major success. After all, out-of-sight, out-of-mind. If you can define a human as less-than-human, you can lynch him, or do whatever you want to him.
In our major liberal, enlightened strongholds, we have achieved success. The likelihood of a darkie being born is 2/3, and as good as 1/2. That equals a drop in the food line, sparing my charity dollars for widows and orpahns, and reduces how many of those darkies are at my enlightened child’s public school. A drop of 1/3 or 1/2 of those savages is a success.
Did I just say ‘savages’? Oh, excuse me – I meant to say that no, our minds are not meant to rule our passions – acting like a ‘savage’ is normal ; expecting someone to keep it in their pants is just those oppressive Christians legislating our morality – instead, we believe if it feels good, do it – unless it ruins our school district and property values, in which case we say ’if it feels good, do it, as long as the killing is kept to black-on-black crime, and as long as those darkies are aborting at least 1/3 their progeny.
After all, we cannot expect people to rule over their sexual passions, can we? Can we? Can you relate? Isn’t an active sex life necessary for a healthy, fulfilling life? Never mind what “healthy” and “fulfillling” might mean.
Just make sure to present all of this as the most benevolent “charity” – we killed your baby at no cost to you, so go ahead and enjoy your life, get your STDs treated so my husband does not catch them when he wanders, and make sure to vote on election day.
Oh – you have no health care because we don’t want you in our doctor offices? Well, here is a clinic just for you. Paid for by those sad saps who actually believe it is better to keep it in your pants most of the time – but HEY! do as I say, not how I myself decide to achieve respect and economic opportunity, right? I mysself am not into promiscuity, but I defend to the death your right to have multiple partners, 70% babies outside of marriage, and whatever else is going on over there on the other side of the tracak marks.
Planned Parenthood will survive as long as we liberals can disguise the human rights tragedy of racial feticide as some sort of noblesse oblige.
CC, I AM a gem. You have a nice day.
Great informative article. I loved reading the facts.
CC, There is one word that explains why government programs are so ineffective at helping poor families. “subsidiarity”.
Truthseeker, the Catholic principle of subsidiarity does not state that government programs are ineffective at helping the poor. Nor does it state that they should never do so. It does state that IF the local community or individuals have the due authority to solve the problem and are able to do so, then a higher government authority, as a matter of justice, should not usurp that right to do so from them. It also stands to reason that those closest to the problem with usually do the best job at solving it.
On the other hand, IF local efforts or private charity can’t solve our massive poverty problem alone, then it is right for the government to lend a hand – not to take over, of course, but to help out, because the government does have a duty toward its citizens. Pope Leo XIII explains:
“if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.” (Rerum Novarum, 14).
Also subsidiarity is not the only principle of Catholic social teaching. Solidarity or the desire for the common good plays a large role, as do other principles.
The trouble is, some people just snatch at one principle that can in some way be made to coincide with their pre-determined ideology and often distort it to suit themselves, without ever looking at the whole. Yes, the left also misreads the solidarity principle and ignores the Church’s sound warnings about an omnicompetent welfare state stripping all initiative from the individual. Or like CC, they automatically and wrongly assume that those who don’t believe in a particular government solution are “abandoning” the poor, when they are in reality often deeply committed to giving of themselves personally to the poor. The right does the opposite. The Church believes there is something in between.
Catholics on the left and right should do a little actual reading of Church documents in this area. I don’t really want to base my opinions of you understanding of the Church’s teaching on just one sentence of yous, but your statement was a good jumping off point. I read this kind of misstatements of Catholic social teaching here all the time and it’s very frustrating to listen to.
And regarding subsidiarity. That’s a Catholic term. But the Catholic church is still not lobbying for the end of welfare because they know that they could not possibly provide what the government is funding. And to give them their due, they do attempt to provide some funding for the poor. But there is NO way that they could provide income/medical assistance/food stamps/child care/educational and training programs that the state provides without which women would be in dire poverty.
You are quite right about this CC. The Church also also partners with the government in these matters. But what happens when the USCCB and Catholic organizations and charities get yanked from these programs, like assistance to illegal immigrants and sex-traffic workers because they won’t act against their consciences in regard to abortion and contraception? Not to mention the threats to Catholic hospitals and health care workers by the systematic elimination of conscience clauses. Are you in favor of this? Because the Obama administration is acting like it wants to end all influence of the Church in the social sphere. And if they keep up this stupidity, they just might. Blind adherence to abortion /contraception as a social savior also hurts the poor.