Planned Parenthood's decades of death

Planned Parenthood's decades of death
By Steven Aden
11/8/2011

Last month, Planned Parenthood celebrated 95 years of providing “essential health care” for women throughout this country. But if you’re like most Americans, there’s a good chance you didn’t know the anniversary took place. For unlike the pro-abortion heydays of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Planned Parenthood’s so-called “successes” are frequently being heralded with a whimper rather than a bang.

The bottom line is that more and more Americans—especially young Americans—find the killing fields of Planned Parenthood abhorrent. In other words, the once-trendy abortion provider has become a stench in the nose of a large swath of Americans who were fortunate enough to bypass Planned Parenthood’s scalpels.

The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes recently weighed in on this shift in popular opinion: “Pro-lifers have captured the high moral ground, chiefly thanks to advances in the quality of sonograms. Once fuzzy, sonograms now provide a high-resolution picture of the unborn child in the womb. Fetuses have become babies.”

In other words, until sonogram technology hit the levels we’ve witnessed in the last few years, many Americans were able to suppress the cries of their consciences by telling themselves that their babies weren’t babies to begin with. Rather, they were simply lifeless clumps of cells which Planned Parenthood referred to (when they had to refer to them at all) as “products of conception,” or at most, “fetuses.” But those days are long gone. Now, we see that those “fetuses” suck their thumbs, kick their legs, stretch out their arms, and perform myriad other movements common to other babies we hold, cuddle, and protect.

This explains why Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards went out of her way to mark the organization’s 95th anniversary with phrases like “We are here to stay” and “We’ve never looked better.” Like all leftists, she’s accustomed to speaking non-truth to power and hopes that her organization can somehow regain momentum if the right hues are used in painting a picture of the “services” they offer.

The problem Richards faces is that we all know what Planned Parenthood does—they kill preborn children—and they use taxpayer dollars to pay for it.

During the first year Roe v. Wade made abortion on demand the law of the land in 1973, Planned Parenthood commited just under 5,000 abortions. But as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, that figure had risen to approximately 200,000 annually and now sits at over 300,000.

That’s over 300,000 babies whose lives come to a violent end in the womb courtesy of the “essential health care” provided at Planned Parenthood.

Gloria Steinem can proudly wear her infamous T-shirt bragging, “I Had an Abortion,” but she’s not hearing the applause she used to receive for being a standard-bearer for death.

“Times they are a changing,” and no matter what Richards says, they’re not changing in favor of Planned Parenthood. We should all thank God for that.