American Life League’s STOPP International is among the growing number of groups, including Pro-Life Wisconsin (an American Life League associate group), protesting the YMCA of Greater St. Paul, Minn., for its decision to rent its facilities to Planned Parenthood. “It is appalling that the Young Men’s Christian Association—an organization that openly trades on its professed Christian heritage— decided to rent its Camp St. Croix facility in Hudson, Wis., to the nation’s single largest provider of abortions,” said Ed Szymkowiak, national director of STOPP International.
“The YMCA is a community service organization, is open to all, and does not discriminate,” stated a recent press release from the YMCA of Greater St. Paul that justified its decision to continue renting its facilities to Planned Parenthood. “If you take the YMCA’s statement at face value, would the YMCA be willing to rent its facilities to neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan?” pondered Szymkowiak. “Of course not. It’s absurd to believe any organization like the YMCA would offer support to such extremists that have no respect for human life. Their anemic justification in this case is equally absurd.”
According to its official website, the YMCA’s mission is: “To put Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind, and body for all.” Yet a recent statement on the Planned Parenthood matter states, “The YMCA has not and will not take an official stand on the issue of abortion,” and says that it is “because of their opposition to an element of the broad Planned Parenthood agenda,” that groups have asked the contract be cancelled.
Szymkowiak responded, “First of all, we do not oppose an element of Planned Parenthood’s agenda. We oppose everything for which Planned Parenthood stands. Planned Parenthood has aborted more than 3.2 million children since 1977. The YMCA needs to realize that it cannot fulfill their mission to build the bodies, minds and souls of community members when it insists on working with an organization that is the antithesis of that very mission. The pro-death mission of Planned Parenthood, built around a contraception and abortion mentality, kills children, injures women and destroys families.”
Release issued: 4 Mar 04
