By Ryan Bomberger
Abortion activists are trying desperately to blame the actions of one of their own on pro-lifers. The media is spewing the new celebrated talking point that pro-life advocates, who peacefully protest or sidewalk counsel, are the reason women were forced to go to Philly’s “House of Horrors.”
But once again, pro-lifers are forced to help pro-abortion apologists grapple with the facts. Despite existing legislative pro-life protections in Pennsylvania and pro-life protestors outside of their abortion centers, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania (PPSP) has enjoyed an increasing share of the state’s total abortions, especially in the four counties where its abortion centers are located: Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia.
The majority of abortions in these four counties (where most are committed in poverty-stricken Philadelphia) are carried out by PPSP, which has increased its share of southeast PA’s abortions from 4,790 in 2007 to 10,436 in 2010. That’s a huge increase from 28 percent to 55 percent in just three years—all of this while Gosnell was still committing his barbarism at 3801 Lancaster. This isn’t indicative of women being driven away from the largest abortion chain in Philly. No matter the increase or decrease in state abortion statistics, one thing has remained constant with PPSP—its yearly increase in its abortion totals.
According to PPSP’s website, this Planned Parenthood collective has existed in Philadelphia since 1933. Since then, the affiliation has grown to 17 abortion or abortion-referral centers in the 4-county area, many of which provide abortions up to nearly 17 weeks gestation (16 weeks, 5 days). Abortions are legal in PA up to 24 weeks. PPSP committed 60 percent of all abortions in their region in 2011, continuing their upward trend.
PPSP has been around long before Gosnell set up shop, but we’re supposed to believe that poor women had no other choice?
At least two other abortion centers, Philadelphia’s Women’s Center and Drs. Berger & Benjamin, also commit abortions up to 21-22 weeks. There are 65 PA hospitals (the majority of which are located in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh), which are licensed to do abortions. There’s no shortage of places to go to end the life of an unborn child in southeast PA.
But fear is a potent appeal for the abortion industry and its advocates. As long as they . . . keep people away from the truth, they can spin their web of deception, catching all who blindly fall into it. For an industry that boasts of its self-policing, it never accepts responsibility for any of the lethal actions, health violations, or criminal behaviors of its most revered members—its abortionists. So, the game of rhetorical distraction, aided by a more than eager mainstream media, tries to blame Gosnell on the handful of peaceful protestors (many of whom are post-abortive women) who exercise their free speech in an attempt to change the mind of the abortion-vulnerable.
Scare. No Matter What. That should be Planned Parenthood’s new slogan. It’s not enough that they demonize any effort to protect women and young girls from profit-driven shady abortionists, such as those whom Operation Rescue regularly reports on here and here and here and . . . well, you get the point. They have to blame the nonviolent, post-abortive, adoption-advocating, women and men who, contrary to Gloria Steinem’s radical and destructive assertion, don’t see killing their unborn child as a way to “equalize” the sexes.
Dayle Steinberg, PPSP’s president, boasted at a recent Planned Parenthood spring gathering (which featured Steinem) that some of their “clients” would “complain to staff about the conditions” at Gosnell’s abortion mill. “We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health,” Steinberg explained. Wow! She really admitted that Planned Parenthood knew about Gosnell! And they did nothing . . . absolutely nothing. But Steinberg’s admission also shows how much of a lie the new narrative is. Gosnell’s former “patients” weren’t scared away from Planned Parenthood’s clinics, but instead, exercised their “choice” of locations—hardly the picture of poverty-driven, option-less desperation.
And if the line of attack that pro-lifers “scaring women” into the arms of Gosnell weren’t enough, the unapologetic abortion crowd also blames the evil Hyde Amendment for somehow compelling women to subject themselves to the horrors at 38th and Lancaster. So, in the inherently contradictory world of “pro-choice” activism, abortion is both a private matter and a public tax (hence the vilification of Hyde protections). Never mind the fact that neither the PA Department of Health, nor the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, provides any information on the race or socio-economic status of women seeking abortions in the city of Philadelphia. (The Philadelphia Department of Public Health doesn’t record any abortion data.) That doesn’t stop abortion activists from making up stuff and insisting that poor women (code for mostly black women) are demanding to have taxpayers pay to abort their children. This is the talking point repeated with new fervor to defend and deflect.
Steinberg (who receives a hefty $183k salary) declared such nonsense back in 2011 when Gosnell was first exposed: “This care should include Medicaid coverage for abortion services, which would allow women without financial means to schedule appointments at facilities that are clean and professional and offer the highest quality services.”
Planned Parenthood wants to pat itself on the back because in its abortion centers (well, except that squalid Delaware clinic that was just shut down), all mutilated human body parts, blood, and other bodily fluids are tidied up nicely because their annual $524.4 million taxpayer funding can pay for the staff and the equipment to cleanly kill its 333,964 human victims per year. And isn’t half a billion more than enough to cover the abortions of those women PPFA and PPSP consider “low-income” and “in-need”? Of course not. The organization birthed in eugenic racism and antipathy toward the disabled and disenfranchised has always hated “charity.” It’s in their DNA, from their founder Margaret Sanger who considered true charity (in chapter five of her self-penned Pivot of Civilization) the “symptom of a malignant disease . . . instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”
Steinberg and her abortion cohorts don’t get it. Back in January of this year, the PPSP abortion chain president claimed: “During the most recent legislative session in Harrisburg, lawmakers passed and Gov. Corbett signed legislation to impose politically motivated regulations on abortion centers.”
If wanting to prevent future abortionists from killing a woman, severing the spines of seven babies born alive (at least the ones that were known before Gosnell’s trial), and reproductively harming countless other women is what she considers “politically motivated” then so be it. More “politically motivated” acts should rise up to stop such human atrocities. “Pro-choice” activists are content with death committed in the name of abortion, harm done in the name of medicine, and blame redirected when they can’t defend one of their own.
Ryan Bomberger is the chief creative officer of The Radiance Foundation, an educational, life-affirming 501(c)(3) organization. Through creative ad campaigns, powerful multimedia presentations, and compassionate community outreach, Ryan and his wife, Bethany, illuminate social issues in the context of God-given purpose. He is an Emmy Award winning creative professional who has launched the first public ad campaign focusing on the disproportionate impact of abortion in the black community, called TooManyAborted.com. As an adoptee and adoptive father, he dedicates his entrepreneurial and creative passion to educating the public about the intrinsic value we all possess.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at http://www.theradiancefoundation.org/scare-no-matter-what/.