EDITORIAL: Is Planned Parenthood an 'Equal Opportunity' Provider of Abortion on Demand?

Planned Parenthood was the organizational stepchild of Margaret Sanger. Sanger was a racist.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - "To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom..." Pope John Paul II, ("The Gospel of Life," No. 20)

Thirty five years ago, on January 22, 1973, seven unelected justices of the United States Supreme Court, in an opinion which will live in infamy, indirectly aided a National bloodbath.

Roe v Wade has given legal cover to the killing of over fifty million children through legalized abortion. The opinion also laid the groundwork for the growing movement to legally sanction the killing of the elderly and the infirm under a profane and misguided notion of "mercy".

The Roe v Wade decision was not based on sound legal precedent. Rather, it was based on a legal fiction, set into motion years earlier in a series of poorly decided Court rulings concerning contraception and consensual sexual activity between unmarried adults. Those decisions were set into motion, indeed orchestrated, through the efforts of activists who intended to change the law and the culture. They succeeded.

This series of judicial decisions created out of whole cloth a "penumbra" around the First Amendment to the United States Constitution within which the Supreme Court then found a so called "right to privacy". This term was borrowed from astronomy where it refers to the outer portion of a shadow in an eclipse. It certainly has cast a shadow and is bringing an increasing darkness not only on America but throughout the West.

Utilizing this fiction, this verbal construct, the Justices dismantled the real constitutional right, the Right to Life, and the real freedom, the Freedom to be born. This legal fiction, judicially created out of whole cloth, was then bolstered within this poorly written Roe opinion by references to patently incorrect history on abortion in the West and indisputably junk medical science. Roe v Wade is clearly one of the worst legal opinions ever written by the United States Supreme Court.

A study of the earlier decisions which set up the Roe opinion reveals that there was a clear legal and cultural strategy, directly attributable to the activist organization Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood was the organizational stepchild of Margaret Sanger. Sanger was not a nice woman. In fact, she was a racist and an ardent foe of the disabled. She wrote about her views. Her own words confirm this fact of history. She supported the killing of minority children in the womb and expressed frequent disdain for the handicapped. She was well known for her promotion and endorsement of eugenics.

Current leaders of Planned Parenthood balk at such claims. However, they are factual claims and cannot be refuted.

The death of fifty million children since the Roe decision has created what the late Servant of God John Paul II rightly labeled a "Culture of Death" in America and beyond. The unprecedented legal decision overrode any restrictions on abortion in all 50 States. That was until recently, when the most heinous form of feticide, the delivery of a child to within one inch of actual birth and the deliberate crushing of her skull causing her death, was finally upheld as a permissible "restriction" on the so called 'abortion right'.

A University of Chicago economist and a Stanford University law professor released the results of a study entitled "Legalized Abortion and Crime" in 1999. It made the front page of a number of national newspapers. Its claim was that legal abortion has lowered the crime rate by eliminating many of the potential criminals. The alleged "scientific" research with the attendant "statistics" was also accompanied by a claim of neutrality by its authors and heralded by the new Malthusians and social engineers.

The story and the outrage it generated quickly faded. Yet, the fact exists that educated people were arguing that abortion, the intentional taking of the life of a human person in the womb, had societal benefits by somehow protecting us all from more 'criminals'. Could eugenics be far behind?

In pre-World War II Germany, Dr. Karl Binding, a law professor and one of Europe's foremost authorities on criminal law, and Dr. Alfred Hoche, a distinguished psychiatrist and professor of medicine, laid out the results of their "study" in two companion essays entitled "Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life."

Hoche proclaimed that ".....a new age will arrive --- operating with a higher morality and with great sacrifice --- which will give up the requirement of an exaggerated humanism and overvaluation of mere human existence." Most now agree that this team of intellectual elites laid the framework for the eugenics program of the National Socialist regime.

"Come now," some would say, "we have learned the lessons of history. There is no eugenic abortion in the United States." Oh, really?

Little has been written or reported of the effusive support of Planned Parenthood offered by both Democratic contenders for the Presidency. Both candidates have made that support crystal clear. Both opposed the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case, Gonzales v. Carhart, handed down on April 18, 2007. Gonzales upheld the federal ban on the infanticide referred to as "partial birth abortion". The High Court found that the ban did not impose an undue burden on the due process right of women to obtain an abortion.

On July 17, 2007 Senator Barack Obama gave a fiery speech before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. He supported and praised their work. He also opposed Gonzales v. Carhart:

"To appreciate that all you have to do is review the recent decisions handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States. For the first time in Gonzales versus Carhart, the Supreme Court held--upheld a federal ban on abortions with criminal penalties for doctors. For the first time, the Court's endorsed an abortion restriction without an exception for women's health. The decision presumed that the health of women is best protected by the Court--not by doctors and not by the woman herself. That presumption is wrong. Some people argue that the federal ban on abortion was just an isolated effort aimed at one medical procedure--that it's not part of a concerted effort to roll back the hard-won rights of American women. That presumption is also wrong....

...I have worked on these issues for decades now. I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law. Not simply as a case about privacy but as part of the broader struggle for women's equality. Steve and Pam will tell you that we fought together in the Illinois State Senate against restrictive choice legislation--laws just like the federal abortion laws, the federal abortion bans that are cropping up. I've stood up for the freedom of choice in the United States Senate and I stand by my votes against the confirmation of Judge Roberts and Samuel Alito"

That same day, Senator Hillary Clinton addressed the same gathering. In her speech she not only praised the organization, but she advocated the "Plan B" pill be made available with Federal funding, called for a massive expansion of so called "sex education" in our schools and then made equally clear her support of continuing the regime which denies the right to life and substitutes in its place a so called "right" to take life, as long as it is life in the womb.

All of this, along with expressing her opposition to the holding in the Gonzales case:

"Now, finally, when I am president, we will stand up for choice and nominate judges to our court who protect and preserve our Constitutional rights. For six and a half years, President Bush has appointed one ideological, anti-choice judge after another--Judges Pryor and Owen to the, in the circuit courts, to Justices Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court.

Now when I voted against both Justice Roberts and Justice Alito [applause], I made statements that expressed my fear that they would use their seats on the Court to undermine Roe. I hoped that I was wrong; I'm sorry to see that I was right. With Justices Roberts and Alito, the Court handed down Gonzales versus Carhart. And with that one decision, five justices dismissed four decades of precedent protecting women's health--basically denying medical decision making and undermining the right to choose.

So let me be clear, when I am president, I will appoint judges to our courts who understand the role of precedent. That it actually does mean something. And also the importance of Roe v. Wade--that it truly is the touchstone of reproductive freedom and the embodiment of our most fundamental rights. That no one--no judge, no governor, no senator, no president --has the right to take away."

This Gonzales decision was limited to Partial Birth abortion, which is never medically supportable and which the overwhelming majority of decent Americans oppose. Yet both of these candidates want to see it overturned. They simply support an unrestricted approach to Abortion. An approach where abortion can be chosen for any reason and at any time throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy.

Recent investigative coverage, reported by Lifesite news, has revealed a horrid incident involving Planned Parenthoods' fund raising efforts. A phone counselor was asked by a potential donor if they could specify that his or her funds only be used to abort black children. The ensuing dialogue is shocking and reveals overt racism. The Planned Parenthood representative assures the potential donor that such a donation would be accepted.

A Student newspaper broke the story, complete with recording and transcript.
Planned Parenthood responded by calling the student group "anti-choice" extremists and targeting the employee. Of course, they denied any racism.

They are equal opportunity accomplices to killing.

Let's be honest. Eugenic abortion is actually supported by our national public policy and protected by our positive law. No-one has to give any reason whatsoever for taking the life of a child in the womb. That child is treated as property and has no rights. The killing is sanctioned by law --- called a "right", even though it is wrong. We rightly decry the sex selection abortions in India. How many are done here? We are rightly outraged at the hint of the use of abortion in a manner that is explicitly racist, yet is it actually being done?

In his prophetic encyclical, "The Gospel of Life," the late Servant of God John Paul II, spoke truth to what he rightly called this "perverse idea of freedom" and reaffirmed the "essential link" between freedom and truth. In "The Splendor of Truth," another prophetic encyclical, he encouraged all those who truly cherish freedom to effective action by reminding us that "freedom itself needs to be set free."

In an age that trumpets the "freedom of choice" as the highest value, we must again proclaim the essential connection between freedom, truth and responsibility. We may be free to choose, but we are not free to make the objects of our choice right or wrong, good or evil. Any procured abortion is intrinsically evil.

The substitution of license for liberty is exactly what John Paul warned of as "a notion of freedom, which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service of them." It has, as the prophet in the chair of Peter warned, resulted from the "eclipse of the sense of God and of man typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by secularism."

When a Nation loses its conviction that the right to life is inalienable and that the dignity of every human person is the foundation of authentic human freedom, it loses freedom itself. It kills it --- in the womb --- or at the bedside of the suffering. Oh, it may continue to mouth the word, and even develop a certain veneer of compassion, and language of "tolerance" behind which it hides its barbarism.

But the Lord still "hears the cry of the poor." In His Incarnation He took up residence in a womb and He died on an instrument of torture reserved only for the worst of criminals. From His wounded side He birthed a new creation, which, clothed with the same power that raised His glorified Body from the tomb, has a mission to speak truth to unbridled power, in so doing, to expose the lies of the "cultures of death" throughout the last two thousand years.

Sometimes, just when the darkness looks like it will sure sweep the truth away, the Church, through her members seems to lead the way to a rebirth of truth, life and authentic freedom.

As we walk ahead into what is clearly a new missionary age, the third Christian millennium, the task has passed to us. In a particular way, it has fallen to Catholic Christians. We have been given the treasury of truth in the teaching of the Catholic Church. As the scripture makes clear "...to those to whom much is given, much more will be required."

This treasury has not been given so that we can retreat from this culture. We must not see ourselves as a beleaguered "victim" group and simply protect ourselves. We carry on the redemptive mission of the Author of life and the One who is Truth. He still hears the cry of the poor and He expects that we will be His hands to protect them, lift them up, and to provide freedom to the captives.

Planned Parenthood is an evil enterprise. It must be exposed. The truth about its founder, Margaret Sanger, also needs to be told.

And the killing must come to an end.

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