Believe it or not, Planned Parenthood, today the nation’s largest abortion provider, once advised potential clients that abortion “kills the life of a baby.”
Obianuju Ekeocha, founder and president of the pro-life organization Culture of Life Africa, recently uncovered and posted on Twitter two Planned Parenthood pamphlets, one from 1952 and the other undated but from roughly the same time period.
The pamphlets advocate the use of birth control for family planning. After explaining what birth control is and isn’t (it does not require surgery, for example), the pamphlets ask, “Is it an abortion?” The answer, directly from Planned Parenthood itself:
Definitely not. An abortion requires an operation. It kills the life of a baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health. It may make you sterile, so when you want children you cannot have them. Birth control merely postpones the beginning of life; abortion kills life.
This, by the way, is in keeping with the opinions of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who was president of the organization at the time the pamphlets were printed. Sanger considered abortion to be an alternative to birth control, not simply another form of it, and wrote, “It is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn.” She would later declare abortion immoral because “no matter how early it was performed it was taking life.”
Sanger died in 1966. Four years later, Planned Parenthood performed its first legal abortion, in Syracuse, New York. By 1976, thanks to Roe v. Wade, the organization was performing 70,000 abortions a year. In 2015, it performed 320,000 abortions, or 35 percent of all abortions in the United States. (By contrast, despite Planned Parenthood’s propaganda that it is primarily in the business of improving women’s health, the group performs only 0.8 percent of all Pap tests, 1.8 percent of all clinical breast exams, and no mammograms.)
In 1952, Planned Parenthood said abortion is “dangerous to your life and health” and “may make you sterile.” Today its website claims that in-clinic abortion is “one of the safest medical procedures you can get” and that “unless there’s a rare and serious complication that’s not treated, there’s no risk to your future pregnancies or to your overall health.”
The pamphlet “lays bare the hollowness of the organization’s claims about the gruesome reality of abortion,” observed the Resurgent’s David Closson. “It also reveals the culture of death’s progress in the last few decades. What was once viewed as ‘dangerous’ is now declared to be ‘safe.’”
On his radio program, Glenn Beck said Planned Parenthood is “now advocating for the murder of children according to their own pamphlet.”
Abortion advocates, if they even dared address the discrepancy between Planned Parenthood’s mid-20th century opinion and its current one, might argue that the change is warranted given advances in medical science in the intervening years. Better technology probably has made abortion safer for women, although the Kermit Gosnell case might suggest otherwise. By the same token, advancing technology such as ultrasound has made it clearer than ever that abortion kills a living human being, not a mass of undifferentiated tissue.
“Have we discovered that that tissue is not a baby?” asked Beck. “Have we developed things that show that that 15-week-old thing inside of you is not a baby? No, we’ve found just the opposite.”
Despite this, abortion-on-demand remains the law of the land; and Planned Parenthood, contrary to repeated promises by Republicans including President Donald Trump, will not only continue receiving federal funding but also get more of it under the latest stopgap spending bill.
Planned Parenthood had it right in 1952: “Abortion kills life.” Now that murdering the unborn is the organization’s bread-and-butter, it urgently needs to be defunded. Then, Supreme Court notwithstanding, it should be forced by state and local governments to stick to life-affirming practices or else be put out of business.
