Commentary by Judie Brown
Nothing is quite as sad as the news that a young person has perished as the result of an act of violence. Somehow it is more heart-wrenching to hear of an unexpected passing than it is to know ahead of time that someone with a serious illness is not expected to live much longer. Life is like that; we seem to react in a more anguished fashion when death robs someone of life unexpectedly.
It should be that way across the board, whether death occurs because of a gunshot ? or a botched abortion. But this isn’t the case, as the recent news that four more women died after medical abortions makes clear. Americans lament those who have died too soon because of the war in Iraq, but their sensibilities seem to be immune to the deaths that occur because a war is being fought on our soil against the preborn child.
Many of us have grown to accept, without a whimper, the meanderings of those organizations that market this unseemly brand of depopulation. Nobody seems to mind if abortion kills a human being ? and occasionally kills the mother of a baby as well.
The master of this vicious game is Planned Parenthood. The organization has a vested interest in keeping its abortion business alive and growing. Planned Parenthood’s claim to fame is that it has led the fight to legitimize the brutal desecration of human beings who are not yet born. It can only offer compassionate platitudes for the women here and there who paid for abortion with their own lives.
Some would say the media is in cahoots with Planned Parenthood’s deceitful ways, but that would be disingenuous. What I want to share with you is the not-so-obvious, but far more sinister reality.
It has been a little more than 85 years since Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, first told women they needed to do something about having too many babies. Sanger claimed it was not healthy for women to have children too close together, and she added that women had every reason to be concerned about how they might control their fertility. Along the way she attacked the Catholic Church, ingratiated herself with powerful financiers far and wide and paved the way for an all-out embrace of her philosophies by the federal government.
Planned Parenthood is still marketing sexual pleasure, still advocating birth control for young, old, rich, poor and everyone in between. But now it has added several types of abortion to its bag of tricks. As usual, Planned Parenthood does all it can to keep women in the dark about what really happens in their bodies when a child is conceived.
Let’s take medical abortion, for example. Planned Parenthood’s web site notes, "Mifepristone, formerly known as RU-486, has proven to be [a] safe, effective, acceptable option for women seeking abortion during the first several weeks of pregnancy."
Planned Parenthood says this drug is actually a good alternative to the suction abortion, which requires the insertion of a little vacuum that will suck out the body parts of a baby who is in the early stages of life ? the first 12 weeks or so. The organization says this drug is most effective in doing its job of taking care of the pregnancy when it is combined with a second drug.
What is never said is that this type of medical abortion turns the mother of a living child into the mother of a dead child. Planned Parenthood, you see, does not use words like "mother" and "child."
Planned Parenthood refuses to admit that such chemical cocktails are no different from an overdose of a powerful drug that results in a person’s untimely death. After all, the goal of any abortion is the death of somebody. Why else abort?
Planned Parenthood adamantly denies that the war it is waging in the wombs of mothers across this country is far more gruesome than nightly news videos of tragic situations in Iraq and elsewhere in our world.
No, Planned Parenthood is all about denial, deceit and delivery of the bucks into the bank account. When a woman dies from one of these "safe, effective" medical abortions, Planned Parenthood offers the media crocodile tears while insisting that an infection here or there does not a bad abortion make. By the same token, we are told, a few deaths are bound to happen.
The Food and Drug Administration plays along in the "deceit unto death" game. During the planning for an upcoming workshop to discuss the bacteria that has already killed four women who used the mifepristone abortion method, the argument enunciated to the media is that "pregnancy, childbirth or abortion could predispose a small number of women to acquire the bacteria." Why does the FDA make such statements?
Could it be because of Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s size, wealth and influence? Does its power derive from who Planned Parenthood is or from what others have given this organization? Planned Parenthood operates more than 800 facilities in our country. It is a non-profit corporation that receives more than $200 million in tax dollars annually.
Planned Parenthood has become the largest provider of abortion in the United States by consistently calling pregnancy a "condition," by consistently denying that abortion kills a person, by consistently arguing that pregnancy does not begin until one week after the baby’s life begins, by consistently placing misleading information into the hands of school children as young as six, by consistently receiving higher and higher amounts of tax dollars from the U.S. government (regardless of who controls Congress or the White House), by consistently promoting the concept that a right to privacy trumps the right to life, the right to know, the rights of parents and the right to truth.
With a record like that, is it any wonder that some of us feel nothing but shame when addressing the very people who could cut Planned Parenthood down to size with a swift and simple act that would deny all funding at once and under any circumstance?
The reality of the situation is this: you and I are paying our taxes to a federal government that has bought into the Planned Parenthood "deceit unto death" campaign, hook, line and sinker.
Talk about an unjust war being funded by and supported by everyone from the White House on down! The "deceit unto death" campaign is real and the body count is rising. But together, we have the power to make it stop. Do we have the courage and determination?
Release issued: 13 Apr 06
