While out and about yesterday, I glanced through the July 21st edition of Eugene Weekly, which an ultra-"progressive" rag that sings the praises of saving trees and insects, killing the unborn, ingesting illegal substances, and "alternative" lifestyles. A short article, "Planned Parenthood's New Digs", caught my eye:
Across the U.S., Planned Parenthood has weathered the political climate much like Harry Potter and friends defending Hogwarts from Voldemort. And despite the best efforts of those bearing the dark mark, Planned Parenthood is “The Clinic That Lived.”
I don't follow Harry Potter at all, but I think I'm correct in interpreting the above as saying Planned Parenthood are the Good Guys, while those who oppose the work of PP are the Evil Guys. But what, exactly, is the main work of PP?
“We’re here. Our doors are open,” Planned Parenthood of Southwest Oregon (PPSO) President Cynthia Pappas says. In fact, Southwest Oregon is one Planned Parenthood region that is brimming with good news. In September, construction workers will break ground on a new Regional Health and Education Center in Glenwood.
The need for the Glenwood facility became apparent, Pappas says, because PPSO’s existing facilities weren’t built to handle the volume of patients they now experience. “The Regional Health and Education Center is going to allow us to increase our client volume by about 50 percent,” Pappas says. It will also provide meeting space for parent education classes, Planned Parenthood’s youth council and its sex ed boot camp for educators.
Ah, "parent education classes" and "sex ed boot camps". Okay. Anything else?
The decision to build between Eugene and Springfield in Glenwood was made easy by the transportation infrastructure, according to Pappas. “There’s an EmX stop right at our property, we’re as close to the UO at the new location as the current High Street location and it gets us a little more of a direct route from the LCC campus,” she says. In addition to a public transport-friendly location, the new building is aiming for LEED silver certification.
So, PP is very close (less than a five-minute drive) from a large state university (23,000+ students) and a community college. Why? Do college-aged kids really need to attend "sex ed boot camps"? Haven't they received plenty of "sex ed" for years by the time they hit their late teens? Since the Eugene Weekly thinks so highly of the "good guys/gals" at PP, and since PP performs over 300,000 abortions a year (while involved with less than 3,000 adoptions a year), surely the newspaper would want to readily acknowledge the central, money-making "work" of the organization. But, no, the piece is fully intent on portraying the folks at PP as potential victims of violence (no mention, again, of babies being destroyed in the womb):
Despite PPSO’s run of positive events, Pappas admits that the year has been a rough one. “There’s really a very focused effort to discredit Planned Parenthood and defund the services we provide, which really puts clients at an extraordinary disadvantage across the country,” she says. At PPSO’s Birds and the Bees Garden Party July 15, the organization sent its guests directions only after they registered for the event, partially to gather an accurate head count, Pappas says, but also with safety in mind.
“We, like any Planned Parenthood, have our detractors,” she says. “We have picketers. People have the right to have a difference of opinion and they are for the most part very respectful and nonviolent.”
Pappas says of the national climate, “In Oregon we haven’t been impacted yet and we feel very fortunate for that, but it doesn’t mean that we can be complacent. We work every day to ensure that birth control access is available and affordable.”
Oh my: PP had a "rough year"! Hand me a hanky! Give me your bloody shoulder to cry on! But how rough, in comparison, was it for the aborted girls and boys,and their scarred mothers who must now bear the life-long pain of having an abortion? Thank goodness, however, that PP is so openminded about the "detractors" who don't understand, in their narrowminded obsession with human life and human dignity, the importance of "birth control access". It must be hard to see people criticize your gravy train, especially when there are so many potential victi—er, "clients" to be had.
Well, I just looked up "Lord Voldemort" on Wikipedia (oh, please, it works just fine sometimes) and found this description:
[Rowling] elaborated that he is a "raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people's suffering", and whose only ambition in life is to become all-powerful and immortal. He is also a sadist who derives amusement from inflicting pain on others without any remorse and murders people just for fun, especially Muggles, and does not recognise the worth and humanity of anybody except himself.
Quick exercise in simple logic: which of these two groups does that most sound like?
A). Those who encourage, perform, and make money from the destruction of potential and existing human life through contraceptives and abortion.
B). Those who believe that from the moment of conception, every child deserves life and love, free from the possibility of being murdered.
Ooh. That's a tough one. I also noticed that the character Lord Voldemort works to acheive "pure-blood dominance":
Rowling draws several parallels between the pure-blood supremacists and Nazi ideology in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the belief that pure-blood wizards have the right to subjugate the Muggle world and view themselves as a "master race", laws requiring Muggle-borns to register with the Ministry of Magic, rounding up Undesirables, etc.)
And who was one of the leading proponents of racial eugenics in 20th century America? That's right, kids: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, as this article on BlackGenocide.org outlines:
At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.
Sanger's other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as "scientific" and "humanitarian." And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America's human "breeding stock" and purging America's "bad strains." These "strains" included the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."
Not to be outdone by her followers, Margaret Sanger spoke of sterilizing those she designated as "unfit," a plan she said would be the "salvation of American civilization.: And she also spike of those who were "irresponsible and reckless," among whom she included those " whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers." She further contended that "there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped." That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment of Sanger considered "unfit" cannot be easily refuted.
While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920), "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921), "The purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924), "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925), "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928), and many others.
For more on the delightful and charming Sanger, see "The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans", by Tanya L. Green. Finally, on a directly related note regarding PP, here is the opening of Helen Alvaré's just-posted essay, "Contracepting Conscience":
Richard John Neuhaus once commented that the “philosophes” of the French Revolution would turn over in their graves to discover how the Catholic Church had become the chief defender of the place of reason in the public square in the late 20th century. Today in the 21st century it is the feminist revolutionaries of the 1960s who are squirming in their rocking chairs as the Catholic Church dares to defy “the establishment” to stand for the freedom of women and of conscientious objection to federal mandates.
The greatest attack on women’s freedom is last week’s recommendation by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) that the new health care law should mandate “the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive methods [and] sterilization procedures” as “preventive services.” This means that every health insurance plan must provide these services without co-pays or deductibles. “Grandfathered” employer plans are exempted, but these lose their “grandfathered” status if the plans are significantly changed; HHS estimates that by 2013, about 88 million Americans’ preventive services coverage will be affected by federal decisions. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has solicited IOM’s recommendations and will render a final decision August 1.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops responded immediately that the new threat to religious conscience posed by this recommendation fails women. He noted further that the “FDA-approved” category includes even abortion-inducing methods (such as Ella), and that IOM’s report appeared to be driven by ideology, not science or care for women’s health.
If you want to give new meaning to the word “outsider” in Washington today, identify yourself prominently as a conscientious objector to birth control as a tool in the “war against unintended pregnancy.” A giant federal health care bureaucracy becomes your enemy. So does one of its closest collaborators, the self-described champion of all things female, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The IOM’s report gave Planned Parenthood everything it lobbied for—even the opinion that abortion, too, is a form of preventive health care, but one that the IOM believed it could not recommend in light of extant law.
Read her entire essay on the Public Discourse site.
Related Ignatius Insight Articles, Excerpts, & Interviews:
• Abortion and Ideology | Raymond Dennehy
• The Illusion of Freedom Separated from Moral Virtue | Raymond Dennehy
• Contraception and Homosexuality: The Sterile Link of Separation | Raymond Dennehy
• Privacy, the Courts, and the Culture of Death | An Interview with Dr. Janet E. Smith
• What Is "Legal"? On Abortion, Democracy, and Catholic Politicians | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Deadly Architects | An Interview with Donald De Marco and Benjamin Wiker
• Human Sexuality and the Catholic Church | Donald P. Asci
• The Truth About Conscience | John F. Kippley
• The Case Against Abortion | An Interview with Dr. Francis Beckwith
• What Is Catholic Social Teaching? | Mark Brumley
• Introduction to Three Approaches to Abortion | Peter Kreeft
• Some Atrocities are Worse than Others | Mary Beth Bonacci
What do these people mean exactly,by giving people sex education.?Are they really trying to convince people they need a Planned Parenthood sex education to find out babies are not delivered by the stork these days.?Who knows,maybe there is still a few innocent teenagers out there that are not aware of the birds and the bees story,i would think very few.
Perhaps they want to educate people on the transmission of std's.?Fine,let people know that promiscuous sex is risky and dangerous not to mention immoral but that is not the case with this "organization" that calls itself Planned Parenthood.It is nothing more than a condom dispenser that gets rid of babies that are concieved in unplanned and immoral circumstances.
It should be a place where people feel ashamed to enter,decent people do not need the services this immoral organization provides.
Posted by: peter l | Monday, July 25, 2011 at 03:43 PM
Hogwarts is a school, and as a school it's full of children.
So why is this moron suggests that PP is protecting children like Harry Potter? They are killing them.
Posted by: beng | Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 04:29 PM