By Jim Sedlak
Five years ago, we ran two stories in the Wednesday STOPP Report about how Planned Parenthood uses bullying tactics to try to force others to give it what it wants.
The first story concerned how Komen Foundation attempted to end its relationship with Planned Parenthood and stop giving money to PP. Planned Parenthood unleashed a barrage of action against Komen—including political and media pressure. After a two week barrage of activity, Komen gave in and still funds Planned Parenthood.
The second story was about a small Catholic food pantry in Wisconsin that refused a donation from Planned Parenthood Wisconsin. Similar to the Komen case, PPW began an effort to chastise the food pantry for not taking the donation. However, in this case, the pantry did not cave and Planned Parenthood didn’t win.
Now, Planned Parenthood is at it again at the level of the federal government. As you know, there are many misguided people in the country who are upset at the election of Donald Trump. As a result, people began some public protests. Planned Parenthood is now trying to coopt these protests and claim they are all about supporting Planned Parenthood taxpayer funding. It is doing this through its oft-repeated claim that taking taxpayer money away from Planned Parenthood is actually an attack on women’s healthcare. This, of course, is nonsense.
Planned Parenthood does not provide real healthcare to women. It only provides products that stop a woman’s body from acting normally and then doing tests to see how much damage (cervical cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.) its products have caused the woman. When it finds an incident where the woman’s body actually performed normally and she is pregnant after having sexual intercourse, it simply kills the child.
Any fly-by-night medical facility that operated this way would just be shut down. The operator would probably be thrown in jail. But Planned Parenthood is a $1.3 billion a year corporation with a political arm (Planned Parenthood Action Fund) that endorses candidates and spends a lot of money to get them elected. So it gets special treatment. It has a mammoth amount of influence in the media and is able to convince ill-informed young people—and hungry politicians—that it is somehow necessary.
Never mind that in a big city like El Paso, Texas, it closed all of its facilities overnight, without warning, and the women of El Paso still receive their medical care without Planned Parenthood. Never mind that, in the rural area of the Texas Panhandle, Planned Parenthood closed all 19 of its facilities over an eight year period and the teen pregnancy rates declined, while women still receive their medical care without Planned Parenthood.
There are many other examples of the fact that, as Planned Parenthood closed 313 medical facilities over the last 20 years, women in all those areas still receive needed healthcare.
But that’s not important to Planned Parenthood or its fawning media or bought-and-paid-for politicians. What is important to them is the billion dollar bully in the room. Like any playground bully, Planned Parenthood exists by intimidation. It has to be continually vigilant to keep everyone in line so it can maintain control. It thrives by spreading fear and threats.
But Planned Parenthood now has a problem. It faces a Trump administration that is not afraid to fight back publicly. It faces a vice president who was the first member of Congress to introduce legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, by name. It is facing an American public who are just sick and tired of the bully.
It’s time to get rid of the bully and move on with our lives. Just say NO to Planned Parenthood and to all who support Planned Parenthood’s reign of terror.
Jim Sedlak is executive director of American Life League and founder of STOPP International. He has been actively fighting Planned Parenthood since 1985.
image: Gabe Austin via Flickr | CC-2.0
