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 the following your ecard:

Remember, if your organization wants to cure breast cancer, stop funding an organization that offers free breast exams. Because that makes sense.

Directly below her post was another your ecard. It was the same size and color, but expressed exactly the opposite sentiment:

Welcome to Planned Parenthood where we don't do mammograms but we will gladly give you birth control pills that cause Breast Cancer.

For my part, I can't help but feel that people on both sides of the abortion issue are making more of the Komen decision than we really should. The fact that Komen ever partnered with Planned Parenthood in the first place is strong evidence that the leadership at Komen supports abortion as a matter of public policy. No one who is ideologically opposed to abortion would partner with the nation's largest perpetrator of abortion. And do not forget that the Komen website continues to deny even the possibility that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer, despite significant evidence indicating a causal connection. The fact that the nation's breast cancer epidemic corresponds to the nation's abortion epidemic seems lost on them–and keeps them from informing women about one of the few risk factors that is both behavior-based and avoidable. If abortion does increase a woman's likelihood of developing breast cancer, then it will be exceedingly difficult to reduce breast cancer frequency without first reducing abortion frequency.

In terms of their respective bottom lines, USA Today reports that Planned Parenthood received $650,000 in donations within 24-hours of the Komen announcement. They also report that Komen's average, daily donations have doubled since the news broke. In other words, both organizations have financially benefited from the split–which is worth considering whether you're an abortion-opponent who is celebrating this as victory over Planned Parenthood or an abortion-advocate who claims this will cripple breast cancer prevention.

A video of Komen founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, just posted to their website in response to the controversy, reiterates the claim that Komen's new policy has nothing to do with the fact that Planned Parenthood provides abortions. It has to do with the fact that they don't provide mammograms. In Brinker's words, they've decided to limit their funding to organizations that are "actually providing the mammograms."  Despite Planned Parenthood president, Cecile Richards', erroneous public claims, Planned Parenthood doesn't provide mammograms, and that, according to Brinker, is the real problem. This, of course, leaves open the possibility that should Planned Parenthood start performing mammograms in the future, they could reclaim their grant money.

The real issue for abortion-opponents is one of ideology, and it's one abortion-supporters don't seem able to grasp. It boggles their mind why "pro-lifers" can't make a mental distinction between Planned Parenthood, the abortion business, and Planned Parenthood, the women's health care provider. Essentially, there are two reasons why such a distinction is impossible to maintain. The first is a practical one. The second is a philosophical one.

Think of it in terms of Abort73. Let's say we devoted a portion of our website to breast cancer education. Now let's say someone gave us a large donation but specified that is was only to be used for breast cancer-education, not abortion-education. How can an organization with one logistical infrastructure make such a distinction? If we're using the same staff, the same building, the same computers for both projects, then any donation that benefits one project inherently benefits both. So it is with Planned Parenthood. If they're receiving money that is tagged for "non-abortion" use, that money still benefits their organization as a whole and frees up other money that can be invested towards abortion.

The second, more central issue, is a moral one. Fundamental to Planned Parenthood's understanding of women's health care is unrestricted access to abortion. If you don't understand why this is a problem, just flip the issue. What if there was a huge pornography conglomerate, say a Playboy or Hustler, that was also operating walk-in breast-exam clinics. Would the fact that they're helping prevent breast cancer erase what they're doing to demean and objectify women around the world? Would you really be able to make a distinction between the misery and abuse perpetuated by pornography and the health benefits perpetuated by breast exams? Or maybe pornography isn't an issue you care about either. What if it was sex trafficking? If there was an international organization running a legal, but highly dubious sex brothel, and also offering mammograms, would you be able to support the one, but not the other? Would you be able to say your promotion of their breast cancer services has nothing to do with their sex trafficking? Of course not. And while pornography demeans women and forced prostitutions abuses women, abortion kills women... by the millions, before they're even born.

That is why you cannot make a mental distinction between Planned Parenthood, the abortion clinic, and Planned Parenthood, the health clinic. The Nazi regime provided some great services to Aryan Germans, but none of them come close to compensating for what they did at Auschwitz and Dachau. You may object to the comparison, but this is precisely what's at stake for those who are ideologically opposed to abortion.

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 policy at the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says, "Abortion mortality is not systematically collected. What Dr. Grimes' paper most clearly illustrates is the immediate need for reporting requirements for abortion deaths in all 50 states."

The third thing to recognize is that the study's authors, Dr. Elizabeth Raymond and Dr. David Grimes are both abortion advocates. The express purpose of their study was to demonstrate that abortion is "dramatically safer than continuing the pregnancy." Dr Raymond works for the Gynuity Health Projects, a group seeking to expand reproductive health technologies (abortion) worldwide, and Dr Grimes makes no secret of his contempt for state-mandated efforts to dissuade women from having an abortion. They had a clear, ideological agenda going in, and their abortion-related data came from an organization that shares their agenda.

Finally, we must remember that in the scope of abortion-related health risks, there is much more to consider than mortality rates. The two most serious health risks to be tied to abortion are not even considered by studies like these. They are rejected out of hand. But if abortion increases a woman's likelihood of contracting breast cancer and/or experiencing extreme mental trauma, then the safety scale shifts considerably. Dr. Joel Brind suggests that legal abortion has accounted for roughly 300,000 cancer-related deaths in the United States, and many have suggested that the female suicide epidemic in China may easily be tied to their forced abortion policy.

At the end of the day, those who support abortion can give you all sorts of reasons why abortion is perfectly safe for aborting women, and those who oppose abortion can give you all sorts of reasons why it is not. At some level, these are important discussions, but they are peripheral to the central ethical question. Does abortion kill an innocent human being? That is the question at the heart of the abortion debate, and that is the question that ultimately determines whether abortion is an amoral surgical procedure or a historic injustice.

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 warning because a bomb blew up in their Sunday School class.

I make this distinction not to criticize Dr. King's assertion that these girls were martyrs, but to point out that it was a martyrdom wholly beyond their control – which makes their deaths even more tragic. "These children," Dr. King notes, were "unoffending; innocent and beautiful." In life, they were unnoticed on the national scene. In death, King asserts, they have something to say to everyone. And the first audience he addresses is not the KKK, but rather "every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows." Continuing, he declares that the deaths of these four girls comdemn "every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice." Finally, their deaths say to each of us, "black and white alike… that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers."

Dr. King knew that culpability for this crime went well beyond the men in white hoods who detonated the bomb. In large measure, this crime was only possible because of the silence of the church and the unwillingness of decent people to publicly challenge an unjust system. And so it is with abortion. But this reality did not leave Dr. King in despair; it simply drove him deeper into the faith that sustained everything he did. He continues:

…in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.

Here again, the connection to abortion is a powerful one. As Dr. King said some years earlier in his "American Dream" speech, "moral ends" can only be achieved through "moral means." Why? Because "the end is preexistent in the means." Elsewhere in that speech he makes a few more observations that are well worth considering by anyone who sees a connection between the children martyred by the KKK in 1963 and the children martyred by abortion today. Addressing the 1961 graduates of Lincoln University, King tells them:

• Each individual has certain basic rights that are neither conferred by nor derived from the state. To discover where they came from it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given.
• Through our scientific genius we have made of this world a neighborhood: now through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood… We must keep our moral and spiritual progress abreast with our scientific and technological advances. This poses another dilemma of modern man. We have allowed our civilization to outdistance our culture.
• …it is a torturous logic that views the tragic results of segregation and discrimination as an argument for the continuation of it.
• Even a superficial look at history shows that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless effort and the persistent work of dedicated individuals.
• We need religion and education to change attitudes and to change the hearts of men. We need legislation and federal action to control behavior. It may be true that the law can't make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important too.
• I call upon you not to be detached spectators, but involved participants, in this great drama that is taking place in our nation and around the world.
• Certainly all of us want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic personality. But I say to you, there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted.

What a remarkable thing that one of our greatest American heros, a man lionized by virtually all sectors of society, was so unapologetically religious. What are politically-correct historians to do with a man like that? MLK spoke of America as a schizophrenic personality – one that "proudly professed the principles of democracy," but practiced the "very antithesis." I suppose our historical treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr. exhibits much the same schizophrenia. As we increasingly mock biblical conviction and increasingly demand that religion not influence public policy, we still manage to celebrate the life of a humble Christian minister who changed the world by refusing to keep his religion private.

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 our new video. Singer is a bioethics professor at Princeton University who argues that unborn human beings should not be considered persons because they are functionality inferior to cows, pigs, and chickens. Elsewhere in his book, Practical Ethics, he says that killing a newborn baby is the moral equivalent of killing a snail. Though it's tempting to simply write off such a barbaric assertion, Singer is too influential to be ignored. Rather, we must point out that these arguments have been made before. The first episode in the BBC production includes a clip from a Nazi propaganda video for their Adult Euthanasia Program. The euthanasia program was created to exterminate the mentally and physically disabled, but was soon expanded to include prisoners who weren't fit for hard labor. Justifying the necessity of such a program, the Nazi video declares that the "gibbering idiots" targeted for extermination are "inferior to any animal" and are a "burden [to] future generations." Though Singer and his ideologic colleagues don't call unborn human beings, "gibbering idiots," they demean them with plenty of equally unflattering names. More to the point, they've borrowed the "inferior to animals" and "burden to society" arguments almost verbatim.

Though I've long been aware of the abortion/Holocaust comparison, watching Auschwitz revealed a host of more subtle connections that I hadn't noticed before. One of the biggest relates to the industrialization of the execution process. The Nazi state faced two practical obstacles to their vision of mass extermination. The first was the emotional toll it took on the executioners. In 1941, after Heinrich Himmler witnessed an execution of Jews in Minsk, he was told by the general on duty that there was a problem with the SS killers. They were becoming neurotics or brutes. According to the BBC, "Himmler realized he had to find a better way of killing." The second obstacle was their inability to execute and dispose of enough bodies at once. Not only did they need a way to make the killing more palatable for the executioners, they needed to make it more efficient as well. In the end, they graduated from firing squads and pits to a series of failed experiments with explosives (too many body parts in the trees) before finally landing on lethal doses of poisonous gas – a method accidentally discovered when an SS commander almost killed himself of carbon monoxide poisoning after passing out in his garage (in a drunken stupor) while his car was running.

Rudolf Höss was the commandant at Auschwitz during the height of the Holocaust. He was a family-man, living with his wife and four young children in a house just outside the gate at Auschwitz. And yet he directed the largest mass-murder in the history of mankind. One of the members of the Nuremburg prosecution team marveled at how "normal" Höss seemed. He was not the "monster" they expected him to be. Rather, he was "objective" and "matter of fact." He felt he "did his war duty" to the best of his abilities and "never expressed any remorse." Höss' only regret, according to his autobiography, was not having spent more time with his children. He was executed in 1947.

By creating a system that separated the killers from those being killed (Jewish prisoners were forced to carry the dead bodies to the crematorium), the SS was able to spare their members the emotional toil that would have absolutely crippled a firing squad. In the process, they were able to execute 2,000 people at a time – 10,000 per day during the height of Aushwitz's operations in 1944. How does this relate to abortion? It explains how and why the abortion industry can staff itself with "normal" people who go about their lives without exhibiting any sadistic tendencies or emotional instability. Because abortion is almost always a blind procedure, abortionists can do their work at a safe, emotional distance. Just as in Nazi Germany, technological advances have made the killing process much less traumatic for the one doing the killing. And the advent of the abortion pill provides even more separation from the victim. Think about it like this, how many abortionists would be able to continue performing abortions if they had to stare their victim in the face and put a bullet in their head? Abort73's most popular T-shirt asks the question, "Would it bother us more if they used guns?" It would almost certainly bother the abortionist more! Nazi soldiers couldn't handle the long-term, emotional strain of having to execute their victims by gunfire, but they had little problem dropping Zyklon B down a metal chute. For mass-murder to be sustainable in the world today, you have to mechanize the process, which abortion has done tragically well.

Another connection ties to some of the activities common to both the concentration camp and the abortion clinic. The BBC reveals that the soldiers at Auschwitz frequently gorged themselves on stolen food and drink, received a daily ration of alcohol, lived in wild drunkenness and made stealing from the Jews a common practice. Though the SS maintained a facade of professional discipline, the private reality was very different. Sexual assault was common and for two years, they ran a camp brothel – populated by the best looking among the female prisoners. When soldiers were too drunk to turn the lights off, they shot them out with their pistols. Having just updated Abort73's page on abortion clinic abuse, I'm well aware that many similar reports surround the abortion industry. Bernard Nathanson and Norma McCorvey both testified to rampant drug and alcohol abuse. More recent clinic headlines include sexual assault and fraud. When the war effort turned sour for the Nazis, they began burning their own buildings in mass to destroy evidence, which may be why the FBI was so interested to learn that the abortion clinic recently burned in Pensacola may have been owned by an abortionist on trial for five counts of murder in Maryland.

At one point in the documentary, the narrator observes that, "While the main motivation for the Final Solution was ideological, the Nazis were also well aware that they could benefit financially from the crime." To this end, the houses and businesses of deported Jews were seized and redistributed. All personal valuables from the millions of executed captives were sorted and pocketed by the guards or placed in a state treasury. The government of Slovakia even paid the Nazis for each of the 60,000 Jews it deported. When things turned particularly desperate on the Russian front, Nazi officials offered to sell one million Jews to Allied representatives. Certainly, there was an underlying hatred for the Jewish people driving these efforts, but they were also motivated by greed. Here too there are abortion-related overlaps. While there is certainly an underlying ideology driving many abortion advocates, there is no denying the financial windfall abortion provides. This should not be overlooked.

One of the most frequent objections to comparing abortion to the Holocaust is tied to the idea that abortion destroys still developing embryos and fetuses while the Holocaust destroyed fully-aware men and women, most of them with families. The implication is that the experience of death was much worse for these men and women than it is for aborted, unborn children. This is likely true, but does that make abortion any more justified? Is the death of a young child who doesn't know what's happening any less heinous than that of an adult who does know? What is lost in many discussions of the Holocaust is the violence leveled against children. Of the estimated 1.1 million Jews who were killed at Auschwitz, an estimated 200,000 were children. On average, 75% of the people on each transport were killed upon arrival. These were almost exclusively women, children, and the elderly. The rest would be worked and starved to death. When one of the former guards interviewed by the BBC was asked how he could justify the execution of even young children, he replied that though they weren't the enemy at the moment, they would grow up to be the enemy. And so long as they couldn't work, they were useless consumers. "Children entered the gas chamber playing with toys," wrote Rudolf Höss. "I looked upon them as enemies of our people… the reasons for their execution seemed right." In the same vein, it is commonly argued today that children born into poverty are better off dying in the womb. They haven't done anything wrong yet, but they'll grow up to! At best, they'll be a drain on society. At worst, they'll be criminals (as argued by the authors of Freakanomics, who believe abortion helps eliminate future crime).

In Nazi Germany, almost the only Jewish children not to be killed directly were those selected for medical experimentation by Dr. Josef Mengele, who set up shop at Auschwitz. He was especially interested in twins and subjected them to all sorts of genetic testing. Sterilization experiments were also common. This reveals another striking parallel with abortion. Socially, the Nazi party considered Jews to be sub-human, but medically, they were perfectly willing to recognize their humanity – and to put it to scientific use. By the same token, though human embryos and fetuses are considered socially sub-human, their full humanity is unquestionably recognized by the medical community that covets the use of their cells. Embryonic stem cell research and significant vaccine development is built upon the intrinsic humanity of aborted children. The BBC production laments the fact that so few of those employed at Auschwitz ever came to trial, but fails to mention that Dr. Mengele, the most brutal and notorious of all Nazi doctors, turned up years later in Buenos Aires – as an abortionist.

In the early 1940's, Auschwitz was home to the largest mass-murder in the history of the world. But it did not begin as a concentration camp. It began as a Polish army barrack. Today, Planned Parenthood is home to the largest abortion business in America, but it did not begin that way either. It began with birth control and sterilization and worked its way up from there. As noted in Abort73's "A Legacy of Eugenics," Planned Parenthood and the Nazi party were anchored on the same underlying principles. I suppose it's no wonder then that their histories bear so much in common. The BBC estimates that 1,300,000 prisoners were taken to Auschwitz during the four and a half years of its existence. Almost 85% (1,100,000) didn't make it out alive. In 2010, 361,384 unborn children were taken to Planned Parenthood. More than 91% (329,445) didn't make it out alive. Spread that out over four and a half years and the grand total is 1,482,502 – which is a number even Auschwitz would be envious of.

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 abortion.

Though it's too soon to say much more about the investigation in Pensacola, it's remarkable what the investigation in Maryland has already turned up. It began in August 2010 when Brigham and an abortionist colleague, Nicola Riley (also charged) dropped a severely-bleeding patient off at a local hospital after a botched abortion. When authorities showed up at his clinic to investigate, they found 35 second and third trimester fetuses in his freezer – prompting the Cecil County state attorney to seek murder charges under a Maryland law that prohibits the intentional harm of a viable fetus. The stories also reveal that Brigham performed abortions in Florida until his medical license was revoked in 1996. His New Jersey license was suspended in 2010, and a "cease-and-desist" warning was issued to him that same year in Maryland. Leading abortion advocates argue that Steve Brigham is simply an "anomaly," but that is clearly a stretch. The name, Kermit Gosnell, comes to mind.

As pointed out on Abort73's clinic abuse page, it is only the political-safety net surrounding most abortion clinics that keeps more stories like these from coming out. When inspectors finally go in, very bad things come out. Case in point, the abortion clinic closest to my house has been closed since September after miserably failing a state health inspection – the first it was subjected to in many years. A settlement was reached today that will allow them to reopen, but it took four months and a $10,000 fine for the clinic to finally satisfy the relatively basic state health requirements. Call this an anomaly if you want, but I don't. After all, can we really expect anything less from an industry whose entire business model centers on the violent destruction of the most innocent and helpless members of the human race?