By Ian Tuttle
Monday, January 09, 2017
What the government giveth, the government almost never
taketh away, and that’s what Planned Parenthood has been counting on.
Planned Parenthood is an industrial-scale baby abattoir
responsible for more than 300,000 American deaths annually and a degradation of
human dignity on the order of Josef Mengele, and the urgent issue of the day is
whether it should be privately or publicly funded. Democrats are for the
latter. Republicans are of the more modest opinion that if you want to
slaughter your child in utero, you should have to pay for it yourself. That is
what would happen if congressional Republicans succeed in defunding Planned
Parenthood, which they currently plan to do as part of the process of
dismantling President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Planned Parenthood is the recipient of more than $500
million annually in taxpayer dollars ($528.4 million in fiscal year 2013–14),
or about 40 percent of its annual revenue. Under the Hyde amendment, the
organization is technically prohibited from using this money to finance
abortions. In reality, the amendment simply provides a $500-million cushion
atop which Planned Parenthood can conduct its slaughterous business — and the
technical separation of funds depends entirely on Planned Parenthood being
scrupulous in its accounting, which it isn’t, to put it mildly. (It’s worth
noting, too, that the most recent Democratic presidential nominee promised to
end the Hyde amendment, which was an admirably honest middle finger to well
over half the country.)
Since the business of abortion is unseemly, Planned
Parenthood justifies its reception of public munificence by insisting that the
taxpayer subsidies are necessary to guarantee “women’s health” or to provide
“reproductive health care,” the latter a vague constellation of services that
range from pap smears and cervical-cancer screenings to dismembering babies. It
goes conveniently unremarked that it was not conservatives who bundled those
services together. No one forced Planned Parenthood to marry its
cancer-screening and other services (which conservatives have been happy to
fund through other institutions) to a morally dubious practice that the vast
majority of Americans finds wretch-inducing.
It goes equally unremarked that Planned Parenthood is the
happy beneficiary of extraordinary private largesse. In the wake of Donald
Trump’s victory in November, for example, celebrities such as Katy Perry and
Amy Schumer encouraged their social-media followers to donate to Planned
Parenthood “in Mike Pence’s name.” John Oliver used his HBO show (which has an
across-all-platforms audience somewhere in the single-digit millions) to do the
same. In September 2015, children’s author Daniel Handler gave Planned
Parenthood $1 million.
Such things go unremarked because Planned Parenthood’s
desire for public funding has nothing to do with money, of which there is
plenty available, deep-pocketed liberals being easy to come by. Its real aim is
to impose a radically refashioned vision of society on anyone who, for any
reason, might prefer something different. Planned Parenthood, with its roots in
early-20th-century eugenics, is the keystone institution in the progressive
social movement that has set about to overthrow the notion that religious
doctrine, cultural custom, or even biological fact might impose upon a person
some duty they cannot shake off.
So it is that the party of Science! conveniently ignores the biologically indisputable
fact that abortion involves two
bodies, not one, professing instead that there is a magical moment at which a
human being becomes a “person” with a constitutionally protected right to life.
Prior to this, the dogma goes, that person was an indeterminate clump of cells
with no moral status. Why it is that all enwombed clumps of cells unfailingly
transform into human beings rather than hedgehogs, grapefruits, or iPods is
apparently another of those abiding and unfathomable mysteries, like the origin
of the cosmos or the material state of Jell-O.
Abortion is, in other words, the respite of the selfish,
the escape hatch by which to avoid a cumbersome responsibility. It is a
technological “solution” to the “problem” of life. The government — and the
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, and anyone who is against waging “war”
on women — needs to fund it not because it is unaffordable but because everyone
needs to endorse the type of person who wants to be able to abort her child,
the type of person who wants to be duty-bound to nothing and no one except
herself.
Those who would welcome this reimagining seem to be
oblivious to, or heedless of, the consequences, which are not restricted to
mother and child. The violence of abortion severs the bonds between
generations, denying the responsibilities we owe to those past and those to
come, and it severs the bonds that join a community, denying the
responsibilities we owe to those we live alongside. Abortion is the decision to
cut oneself off from the world. Are the loneliness and pain that accompany it
really so mysterious?
Over the past year, particularly strident abortion
advocates have begun encouraging women with the exhortation “Shout Your
Abortion,” a PR campaign in which spiritually wounded mothers publicly boast
about killing at least one of their children. This is abortion advocacy at its
most vicious, attempting to turn self-destructive violence into liberating
triumph.
Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers do not have
clients; they have victims. Defunding is the least of what they should face.
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