By Ken Connor
During the 2012 election season, the American people were subjected to hundreds of campaign ads. Among these were several geared towards women, and many of these were paid for by Planned Parenthood. According to Planned Parenthood, Mitt Romney was bad for women because he wanted to cut federal funding for the organization, thereby depriving millions of women of “vital services.” We heard a lot about cancer screenings in these ads, but very little about abortions.
The reality is that abortion is big business for Planned Parenthood, and Uncle Sam continues to be a complicit financier of the organization’s ghoulish practices. In 2011, Planned Parenthood performed 333,964 abortions, up from 329,445 the year before. The federal government provided the organization with $542.4 million dollars in funding, which is nearly half of Planned Parenthood’s budget. No one likes to talk about the fact that a huge portion of this sum is used to facilitate the willful destruction of innocent human life. The “pro-choice” lobby prefers euphemisms like “women’s health care choices” and “reproductive rights” to fan the flames of “social justice” advocates who frame abortion as a matter of privacy and civil liberty. You’ll never see a Planned Parenthood ad that says “Don’t vote for Candidate X because he/she wants to end federal funding of abortion!!” or “Support the right of women to choose to kill their innocent children.” They’d never do that because they recognize how awful it sounds. They know that they are in a grisly business and that speaking about it honestly would be a turnoff to voters.
The fact that the number of abortions performed at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country is rising and not falling is further evidence that the procedure is a major revenue generator for them, and your tax dollars and my tax dollars are used to fund this soulless enterprise. The oft repeated assertion that the public monies given to Planned Parenthood are somehow separated out and not used for abortions is ridiculous. Money is fungible, and thus American taxpayers are subsidizing the killing of innocent children whether we want to or not.
Whatever happened to the belief, articulated by Thomas Jefferson, that the chief purpose of government is to protect life? What about the principle expressed in the Declaration of Independence that the right to life is divinely bestowed and universal? These convictions are what set America apart as a beacon of liberty and civilization for the rest of the world. Yet somehow we’ve gotten to a point where the deliberate annihilation of unborn children through surgical or chemical means is sacrosanct to the liberal left. The same bleeding hearts that will march in the streets to save the whales, the turtles, the trees, and the Palestinians will also march in the streets to preserve a woman’s right to kill her baby. Their self-absorption and hubris prevent them from seeing the disconnect.
Ronald Reagan once said if you subsidize something, you’ll get more of it. Planned Parenthood’s abortion business will continue to grow so long as a complicit Congress continues to pour tax revenues into this killing machine. But where is the outrage among pro-life members? All they do is wring their hands and furrow their brows and complain that they are impotent to stop the practice. So year after year the government pours millions into the coffers of the biggest abortionist in the business, and year after year hundreds of innocent children perish because of it.
GOD HELP US. THEN AGAIN, WHY SHOULD HE?
Ken Connor founded the Center for a Just Society in 2005 with Colin Stewart and Genevieve Wood. An esteemed attorney, Connor came to Washington, D.C. in 2000 to serve as president of Family Research Council, one of the nation’s leading pro-family public policy organizations. During his three-year tenure at FRC, he directed the organization’s course and was the chief communicator of its purpose, vision, and public policy positions to legislators, opinion-makers, and the media. An adoptive parent, Connor has shown an unswerving commitment to the sanctity of innocent human life. He has served as president and chairman of the board for Florida Right to Life, vice chairman of Americans United for Life, and chairman of the board of Care Net, which has over 500 affiliated pregnancy care centers.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/connor/130115.