The struggle to defund the abortion-marketing giant, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, continues. We find it increasingly absurd that American taxpayers are funding this so-called charity, which specializes in all manner of sexual indoctrination and targets children as young as 10 onward.
Planned Parenthood’s teaching that promiscuity is the antidote to satisfying sexual desire—while also avoiding pregnancy—has been well-known for more than 50 years. Part and parcel of the Planned Parenthood mantra is that when all else fails, abortion is the sacrament of choice. This explains its disdain for Christianity as well.
Planned Parenthood’s perspective on people of faith is, to put it mildly, jaundiced. Its position is that unless such people happen to be devout followers of Planned Parenthood’s doctrine, their faith is pure poppycock.
A recent study completed by the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research group, reported that women of various faith persuasions were barely different from the general population in their use of contraception, including 68 percent of Catholic women. Planned Parenthood’s reproductive health gambit includes targeting Christians—a strategy that is apparently as effective today as it has ever been. For example, according to a Guttmacher Institute press release:
Contraceptive use by Catholics and Evangelicals—including those who attend religious services most frequently—is the norm, according to a new Guttmacher report. This finding confirms that policies making contraceptives more affordable and easier to use reflect the needs and desires of the vast majority of U.S. women and their partners, regardless of their religious beliefs.
“In real-life America, contraceptive use and strong religious beliefs are highly compatible,” says Rachel K. Jones, the report’s lead author. “Most sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant practice contraception, and most use highly effective methods like sterilization, the pill, or the IUD. This is true for Evangelicals and mainline Protestants, and it is true for Catholics, despite the Catholic hierarchy’s strenuous opposition to contraception.”
Like I said, people of faith are Planned Parenthood’s willing customers. But let’s unpack that closing comment quoted above and examine the reasons why the push toward more and more birth control is really a push against God and His laws.
For those of us involved in battling the cultural embrace of contraception, the suggestion that the Catholic hierarchy is strenuously opposed to contraception is laughable. The bishops may be personally opposed to the practice of contraception, but Catholics in particular are so poorly educated when it comes to Church teaching regarding contraceptive use that one can safely say they are oblivious to the fact that the use of contraception is a mortal sin—a serious offense against God.
So why the public vituperation against the hierarchy?
As long ago as 1921, Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger was taking jabs at Catholic leadership, even suggesting that somehow Catholics in general were genetically inferior to non-Catholics! The January 20, 1992, edition of Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine reported:
Sanger’s attack on Catholics appeared to be an attempt to divert attention from the class politics of Planned Parenthood. The Rev. John A. Ryan wrote: . . . their main objective is to increase the practice of birth-prevention among the poor. . . . It is said that the present birth-prevention movement is to some extent financed by wealthy, albeit philanthropic persons. As far as I am aware, none of these is conspicuous in the movement for economic justice. None of them is crying out for a scale of wages which would enable workers to take care of a normal number of children.
Sanger’s sexual license was another motivation for her anti-Catholic sniping. A Sanger biographer, David M. Kennedy, said her primary goal was to “increase the quantity and quality of sexual relationships.” The birth control movement, she said, freed the mind from “sexual prejudice and taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching re-examination of sex in its relation to human nature and the basis of human society.”
Such statements are provocative and show the depth of Sanger’s disdain for people of faith, not to mention the God they believe in. In fact, it is quite apparent that, since those early days, Planned Parenthood has made a concerted effort to convince men and women of all ages that there is a distinction that can be drawn between a person’s faith and a person’s sexual freedom. The result is the enormous market that has been created for birth control and abortion, paid for by U.S. taxpayers and commonly referred to as “reproductive health services.”
While we cannot blame Planned Parenthood for the decisions Catholics make to avail themselves of birth control services, we can posit a theory. Planned Parenthood’s consistent war on God, coupled with the virtual silence of the Catholic hierarchy on contraception, has had terrible results. And, as such, it is clear that taxpayers should not be forced to fund a deliberate attempt to marginalize Christ and His truth in favor of sexual freedom and its disastrous consequences.