By Rita Diller
It seems we have become so accustomed to today’s world of make-believe that we no longer notice that Planned Parenthood frames its anti-life mission in terms of healthcare with not so much as an eyebrow raised in objection. That point has really been brought home during the recent elections and in the research phase for our annual report on Planned Parenthood CEO salaries.
Compiling the data for the report means we examine every Planned Parenthood affiliate website, including videos, mission statements, tax documents, news reports, and more. With each review, I am taken aback by the amount of money that Planned Parenthood affiliates amass and the amounts they pay their top executives. Their verbal gymnastics and pie-in-the-sky promises that are thrown around in attempt to whitewash the evil that they promulgate day in and day out know no boundaries.
For example, today I’m looking at an affiliate that grossed over $74 million in its latest annual reporting period. Seventy-four million dollars in one year. Let that sink in. The CEO salary was $445,591. That puts her in the top 99 percentile of US earners.
The briefly stated mission of the affiliate is: “To support lifelong sexual health and foster a community where every child is a wanted child.”
What have this Planned Parenthood CEO and affiliate done, we ask, to fulfill its mission?
The affiliate’s immediate sphere of influence included Alaska, Hawai’i, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, and western Washington—the largest geographical area of any PP affiliate. The PP affiliate reports 32,603 abortions/abortion-related visits in 2020. It includes 35 facilities in the six-state area.
It opened an abortion facility in Honolulu in 2019, the same year it reported paying a construction contractor in Honolulu $3.7 million. Planned Parenthood operates two of the three abortion facilities in Hawai’i. In Honolulu, PP commits abortion until the beginning of the 20th week of pregnancy—well into the second trimester.
With the average cost of a first trimester Planned Parenthood abortion at $600, and second trimester abortions running $750 up to $2000, that could very conservatively mean $20 million was generated directly by the abortion side of this one affiliate’s business.
In reality, Planned Parenthood is attempting to make every child as disposable as yesterday’s garbage. If PP truly could make every child a wanted child, it would obviously be grossly economically at odds with its own bottom line. It is a historical fact that when Planned Parenthood affiliates do not remain profitable, they are shut down. Follow the money trail and you will see where Planned Parenthood’s priorities lie.
The same affiliate, part of the largest abortion chain in the US, boasts of reaching almost 9,000 youth annually through peer training. That is just the tip of the iceberg of its outreach to children and youth.
Contrary to its actions now, protecting children and teens from the decline and chaos that befalls those who are involved in Planned Parenthood-style sexual pleasure training, contraception, and abortion from an early age would be a very good starting point for providing real lifelong sexual health training.
This Planned Parenthood affiliate also serves up gender-bending steroids, which it refers to as “gender-affirming” hormones. In reality, these steroidal hormones do the opposite of affirming genetically determined sex identity (intentionally misidentified by PP as “gender assigned at birth”). They truly are intended to throw normally functioning sexual development into confusion and chaos.
In this Advent season as we await the birth of birth of the Christ Child at Christmas, we would do well to meditate upon the words of St. John Paul II from the Gospel of Life (1995):
At the dawn of salvation, it is the Birth of a Child which is proclaimed as joyful news: “I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:10-11). The source of this “great joy” is the Birth of the Saviour; but Christmas also reveals the full meaning of every human birth, and the joy which accompanies the Birth of the Messiah is thus seen to be the foundation and fulfilment of joy at every child born into the world (cf. Jn 16:21).
Planned Parenthood’s framing of abortion as a basic human right and its efforts to codify that right in law is the exact opposite of truth and a denial of justice for the least among us.
And yet, it manages to enforce this unbridled barbarism on society today, even in a post Roe v. Wade world, as it has for almost 50 years.
St. John Paul goes on in his Gospel of Life to ask:
“How is it still possible to speak of the dignity of every human person when the killing of the weakest and most innocent is permitted? In the name of what justice is the most unjust of discriminations practiced: some individuals are held to be deserving of defense and others are denied that dignity?” When this happens, the process leading to the breakdown of a genuinely human coexistence and the disintegration of the state itself has already begun.
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.