Get the Facts on Planned Parenthood

by Brian Clowes, PhD

Human Life International has long been at the forefront of the battle against the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), by exposing its true anti-life agenda throughout the world. Most of our readers know that PPFA is a pro-abortion group and that it commits surgical abortions on a large scale. But not all yet realize the insidious nature of PPFA and its horrific impact on society as the behemoth of the abortion industry.

In the United States, about 20,000 staff and volunteers operate 142 Planned Parenthood affiliates and their 900 clinics, 130 of which commit surgical abortions. In 1996, PPFA recorded an income of over half a billion dollars, one-third of which was taken out of taxpayers’ pockets. In the same year, the organization committed 153,367 surgical abortions and referred 54,207 more; administered nearly a million pregnancy tests; had nearly two million birth control customers; filed suit against dozens of pro-life laws; and pushed explicit sex education programs all over the country. These numbers give some idea of the colossal impact that Planned Parenthood has on millions of people every year, and tragically our youth.

Planned Parenthood is involved in every aspect of promoting and performing abortion in the United States. One of the most effective ways pro-lifers can stop abortion is, quite simply, to stop Planned Parenthood.

PPFA’s Involvement in Surgical and Chemical Abortion

In 1984, Faye Wattleton, then-President of PPFA, said "We know that the abortion issue is our issue." Abortion has always been Planned Parenthood’s number one issue.

On 1 July 1970, the state of New York legalized abortion. PPFA was so eager to begin exterminating preborn lives that it committed its first abortion the very next day. It now owns the biggest chain of abortion factories in the country and has committed nearly two and a half million abortions in the last 28 years—a number equivalent to the populations of St. Louis, San Diego, Phoenix, Pittsburgh or Baltimore.

Ever anxious to exploit new ways of exterminating the preborn, PPFA now pushes so-called "post-coital contraception" in a big way. The group recommends "doubling up" on birth control pills in order to enhance their abortifacient effect to end the life of an early developing human being. In 1996, PPFA gave this abortifacient to nearly 30,000 women, and will administer it to 50,000 more this year. It is also beginning to administer methotrexate/misoprostol ("MTX") chemical abortions, and has declared its intention to distribute the RU-486 abortion pill on a massive scale as soon as it becomes available.

To show how lopsidedly it emphasizes only one choice—abortion—PPFA commits or refers ten surgical abortions for each referral for prenatal care or adoption.

PPFA’s Aggressive Pro-Abortion Litigation

Planned Parenthood has demonstrated its absolute commitment to abortion by acting as a plaintiff in hundreds of lawsuits against pro-life laws in almost every state, even when such laws are supported by the vast majority of the people and the state legislatures.

A Planned Parenthood executive was the plaintiff in the 1965 Supreme Court case that discovered the mythical "right to privacy"—Griswold v. Connecticut. Today, PPFA fights any limits on abortion, regardless of how trivial they are. It has opposed informed consent laws, waiting periods for minors, parental or spousal consent or notification, decent burial or cremation for aborted preborn babies, and even attempts to set standards for the licensing of abortion mills, which would safeguard the health of women.

Planned Parenthood has even challenged bans on third-trimester D&X abortions in several states. It also puts the lie to its claim to be a "pro-choice" group, since the only ‘‘choice’’ it supports is abortion. It has attempted to force the Roman Catholic Church to provide abortions to children in its care and has even gone to court to force high school student newspapers to accept its advertisements.

Tax Dollars

In 1970, Planned Parenthood first began receiving government money when its clinic in Corpus Christi, Texas, received $7,000 in government support. Since then, PPFA has swallowed more than $3.9 billion (in 1998 dollars) of our federal, state and local tax dollars in the relentless pursuit of its comprehensive anti-life agenda. In 1996 alone, PPFA received $177.5 million from federal, state and local governments.

Since 1970, Federal Title X grants have been the largest single source of PPFA’s income from outside sources, and it now receives over $40 million annually from this program. In light of the fact that PPFA annually rakes in tens of millions of dollars by selling abortions and makes tens of millions more by selling birth control devices at a huge markup, we must ask why American taxpayers—especially those who are pro-life—should continue to subsidize an organization that obviously can very easily support itself.

This vast Title X government subsidy allows PPFA to pay its operatives staggering salaries. For example, in 1995, PPFA’s then-President, Pamela Maraldo, received a $251,538 salary, and at least four PPFA vice presidents and other officers received salaries ranging between $151,000 and $189,000.

Sex Education

Faye Wattleton said of PPFA: "We are not going to be an organization promoting celibacy or chastity."

Soon after the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision, Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher revealed one of the primary purposes of value-free sex education when he admitted that "The only avenue the International Planned Parenthood Federation and its allies could travel to win the battle for abortion on demand is through sex education."

This makes perfect marketing sense, and postitions Planned Parenthood to perpetuate itself forever. First, it distributes grossly offensive sex education manuals throughout the United States. Teens who might otherwise be chaste learn from these books that it is "perfectly normal" to have sex, and so they visit the local Planned Parenthood clinic and pick up contraceptives. When the contraceptives fail (as they frequently do, especially among teens), then they return to the Planned Parenthood clinic for an abortion or a referral for an abortion elsewhere.

This is a self-maintaining system that any marketer would be envious of: Make money by creating the demand for your products and services, and then reap further profits from selling them.

All of PPFA’s sex education manuals tell our children that they can embrace the complete line of anti-life behavior and be guilt-free: fornication, masturbation, contraception, abortion, pornography and homosexual acts. These manuals also repeat the old Kinsey line that "humans are sexual beings from before birth until death." For example, Planned Parenthood’s sex-ed text The New Positive Images talks about "erections of penis" and "possibility of orgasm" — to three-year-old children.

In addition to promoting immorality, Planned Parenthood has vigorously attacked sex education programs that teach any standard of morality. PPFA has filed lawsuits whose purpose is to ban effective abstinence-based sex education programs from high schools, on the grounds that they "violate the separation of church and state" by teaching a "religious point of view" —i.e., chastity and self-control.

This proves that PPFA believes such effective programs are threats to its income and influence. After all, Planned Parenthood doesn’t make any money from kids practicing chastity.

The objections that most pro-life organizations raise against Planned Parenthood are not only religious in nature, but profoundly practical as well. The natural and inevitable consequences of the permissive agenda pushed by PPFA and other anti-life groups are devastating from a public health standpoint. Abortion, teen fornication, illegitimate births, child abuse and child poverty, "shacking up," venereal diseases, and divorce have increased tremendously since 1970. These in turn have led to other baleful results, from millions more women and children living in poverty to a general relaxing of moral standards and society’s willingness to accept other atrocities such as physician-assisted suicide, cloning and frozen human embryos.

Planned Parenthood’s lavish funding also allows it to attack those who try to slow the deterioration of the health and morals of our society. PPFA has attacked pro-lifers and pro-life laws in the courts at all levels, thereby stripping any legal protection from preborn babies and their defenders.

Every local pro-life group and individual that joins the battle against this anti-life monster weakens it and ultimately makes it easier for all pro-lifers to do their jobs.

There are many things you can do to help:

Learn more about Planned Parenthood. Visit HLI’s Web site at http://www.hli.org for the history and background information on PPFA and for printed materials that you can distribute to help expose its agenda. HLI’s Web site also contains more than a thousand shocking quotes by PPFA’s founder, Margaret Sanger, and her contemporaries.

PPFA gets a lot of its money from state and local governments, and naturally interprets this as support for its agenda. Find out where PPFA’s money is coming from. Gather together and work diligently to eliminate state and local funding of Planned Parenthood at the state and local level. We must do the same at the national level by writing to our elected officials in Congress and demand that they stop funding abortion with our tax dollars in the Title X program.

Educate people about the agenda of Planned Parenthood. Get books exposing PPFA, and donate them to your local public and school libraries. Organize presentations on Planned Parenthood at local schools and meeting halls. Meet with your local elected officials and educate them.

Contribute to Human Life International, which is so effective at exposing Planned Parenthood, that they call us ‘‘Public Enemy #1’’!
Brian Clowes is Manager of the Pro-Life/Pro-Family Institute for Human Life International and author of The Facts of Life and Call to Action or Call to Apostasy?