By Dave Andrusko
Campbell Brown
I’d like to tie together two points from separate sources to make an important point about the preeminent abortion provider in the United States of America, Planned Parenthood.
Students for Life of America released a very interesting poll Friday that interviewed 805 adults online ages 18 to 24 from May 25-June 1, “with controls to ensure the respondents were representative of the American young adult population.” The survey found that 48% [!] were unaware that PPFA performs abortions.
Over the weekend, the New York Times ran an op-ed by pro-abortion Campbell Brown, who you may remember has been a television news reporter and anchor at CNN and NBC. Her basic thesis is that PPFA “has adopted a strategy driven by blind partisanship, electing to burn bridges instead of building them. That strategy is damaging, and possibly imperiling, its mission.” Put another way, in this election cycle PPFA’s “political arm (while proudly claiming to be nonpartisan) has not endorsed or directly given money to a single Republican.”
But who PPFA supports is its business. From our perspective, what’s noteworthy in Brown’s more in sorrow than anger account is that someone who has been a reporter and an anchor for two networks so blithely accepts that “abortions represent only 3 percent of its work” (incredibly misleading) and asserts that opponents—us—claim that PPFA is “solely an abortion provider” (false). Nobody has EVER said abortion is ALL that PPFA does.
So half of the younger population doesn’t even know that PPFA aborts over 330,000 babies a year, while many of their elders (like Ms. Brown) twice mistake [or distort] PPFA’s involvement: minimizing their up-to-their-elbows trafficking in abortion and distorting what those of us who know the truth are saying about the nation’s largest abortion provider.
PPFA IS in trouble, but not because pro-lifers misrepresent PPFA’s abortion business. National Right to Life has carefully documented PPFA’s track record, saying no more than the evidence demonstrates, but no less, either.
A full explanation can be found at www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2012/02/answering-deceptive-arguments-made-by-planned-parenthood/. Let me summarize the core truths.
Before you even get into the “3%” mythology and revenues from abortion, note that a 2009 Planned Parenthood factsheet confirmed that 12% of Planned Parenthood’s clients – nearly one out of every eight women – was an abortion patient! And PPFA manufactures the 3% figure by bookkeeping machinations that you have to read to be believed.
But no matter how PPFA distorts its involvement in abortion, the revenues are staggering. At going rates, the 329,445 abortions done at Planned Parenthood clinics would have represented at least $148.6 million in income. And we are being conservative. The real number may be even higher. Planned Parenthood clinics advertise and perform more expensive RU486 chemical abortions and later surgical abortions (which, according to Guttmacher, average $1500 at 20 weeks).
You get the point, I think. PPFA may be able to maul Komen Race for the Cure into a whimpering retreat, but that expression of political muscle extends in no small part because, like the 48% of American young people, much of the public hasn’t a clue that abortion is Big Business for PPFA.
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