Unpacking Komen’s Split from Planned Parenthood

Earlier this week Susan G Komen for the Cure announced that they were suspending their financial support of Planned Parenthood. Officially, they cite the adoption of a new policy forbidding the funding of organizations under government investigation (which Planned Parenthood is). But many believe the move was more a result of mounting social pressure to sever ties with the nation's largest abortion chain. Despite the slanted media coverage often enjoyed by Planned Parenthood (the LA Times matter-of-factly calls them an "organization dedicated to women's health"), the backbone of Planned Parenthood is abortion. It is their financial lifeblood. And while the American abortion rate has fallen 8% over the last decade, the Planned Parenthood abortion rate has increased by 69%. They performed 332,278 abortions in 2009, and of the pregnant women who came to Planned Parenthood for counseling that year, almost 98% had abortions. Two percent received prenatal care, and less than half of one percent were referred for adoption. Without question, Planned Parenthood's Final Solution to unplanned pregnancy is abortion.

Not surprisingly, Komen's decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood (they gave them $680,000 last year) brought celebration from abortion opponents and indignation from abortion supporters. This dichotomy was perfectly illustrated yesterday on my own Facebook news feed (as I'm sure it was on millions of other feeds around the world). One of my Facebook friends posted

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Life and Death: Comparing the Relative Safety of Abortion and Childbirth

Earlier this week a new study was released on abortion safety. The Reuters Health headline reads: "Abortion safer than giving birth." According to the study, one woman dies in childbirth for every 11,000 births in the United States, while one woman dies from abortion for every 167,000 abortions. These numbers led the researchers to declare that a woman is 14 times more likely to die giving birth than she is to die during an abortion.

There are a number of ways to respond to a story like this. The first is to remind people that even if abortion is safer for the mother, it is certainly not safer for the child. Maternal, abortion-related deaths may be a rarity, but fetal, abortion-related deaths are not. We could just as easily say that for every 167,000 abortions in the United States, there are 167,001 abortion-related deaths. The headline of the MedicineNet article was a much more honest one: "Abortion Safer for Women Than Childbirth, Study Claims."

The second thing to note is the sources of the datasets used in this study. While accurate birth data is available from the federal government, accurate abortion data is not. As such, abortion data must be obtained from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group founded by Planned Parenthood and named after their former president, Alan Guttmacher. The Guttmacher Institute openly advocates abortion and seeks to normalize its use around the world. Speaking to this issue, Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research and public

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Eulogy for the Martyred Children: What MLK Has to Teach Us About Abortion

Yesterday seemed a good day to revisit my copy of A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Included in Part II (Famous Sermons and Public Addresses) is his "Eulogy for the Martyred Children" – delivered at the funeral for the young girls murdered in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. Two years ago, I spent a weekend in Birmingham, AL and attended the Sunday-morning service at 16th Street Baptist Church. I entered alone with a bit of trepidation. For all its historic significance, it remains a relatively small congregation, and I stood out like a sore thumb. I was underdressed and under-pigmented (ie the only white person in attendance), but that visit was easily the highlight of my trip. I don't know that I've ever been so moved by prayer or singing, and the sermon did not disappoint.

The first thing to strike me about Dr. King's 16th Street memorial address was the title given to his sermon: "Eulogy for the Martyred Children." By definition, a martyr is someone who "willingly suffers death" rather than renounce a "religion" or "belief." Strictly speaking, that's not what happened on that tragic Sunday morning in Birmingham. Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Denise McNair (11) were not killed for their religion or beliefs. They were killed for the color of their skin. And they did not die for any professed allegiance to the civil rights movement. They died without

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Factories of Death: Lessons from Auschwitz

In 2005, the BBC produced a 6-part documentary on Auschwitz. I watched it this week while researching a new video for Abort73's "Personhood" page. It was a sobering and unpleasant five hours, but it was good for my soul. It makes the trials and tribulations of my life seem fairly laughable and exposes how grossly insignificant are so many of the things that occupy my attention.

Whether you agree with the comparison or not, the ideological connection between abortion and the Holocaust is a familiar one, aided of late by the release of Ray Comfort's 180. The basic similarities between abortion and the Holocaust are laid out on Abort73's page, "Systematic Injustice." By way of review, both involve the state-sanctioned extermination of a victim class that is considered "sub-human." Both involve a network of killing centers whose activities are largely hidden from public view, and both involve the brutal deaths of multiple millions of innocent and helpless victims. Critics of such a comparison will argue (among other things) that abortion clinics are not trying to exterminate all unborn babies, but this betrays an ignorance of who the victim-class is. Certainly, Planned Parenthood isn't trying to exterminate all unborn babies, but they are trying to exterminate (or "eliminate" as they call it) all unwanted, unborn babies.

The reason I revisited the Auschwitz documentary this week (which I viewed in part last year) is because of a Peter Singer quote that I plan to use in

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Abortion Remains a Sordid Business

Yesterday I updated Abort73's page on abortion clinic abuse. Today I read of a purported connection between one of the abortionists recently charged with five counts of murder in Maryland and the Florida abortion clinic that caught fire over the weekend. Though I suspect the connection between the two may be nothing more than journalistic sensationalism, it was another example of how consistently sordid the abortion industry proves to be. The moral character of its practitioners seems little changed in the 40 years since Dr. Bernard Nathanson first found them to be "as picturesque and venal a band of scoundrels as had been collected [in the history of surgical medicine]."

Why were these two stories connected in the first place? Because the Pensacola abortion clinic that caught fire on New Year's day shares a New Jersey mailing address with the abortion clinics owned by Steven Brigham, the abortionist on trial for five counts of first-degree murder. Authorities have not yet determined whether the fire was an act of arson, but it has turned into a federal investigation because of the nature of the business and the history of violence associated with this particular abortion clinic. It was bombed in 1984, and ten years later an abortionist and clinic escort were shot and killed in the parking lot. Paul Hill, the gunman responsible for the 1994 murders, was executed in 2003, and it's worth mentioning here that Abort73 uniformly condemns the use of violence to oppose

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