By Carol Tobias, President, National Right to Life
Editor’s note. The president’s column appears on page three of the new issue of National Right to Life News, which went online today. You can read Mrs. Tobias’ insights, and all the stories in this 45-page edition, at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJuly-Aug2015.pdf
Carol and her niece Myla
The pro-life movement and most of the country has been horrified by the six videos released by the Center for Medical Progress. They show various highly-placed Planned Parenthood officials discuss how they can secure and preserve intact body parts from unborn babies aborted in their facilities, then haggling over the price of those parts.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) immediately tried to discredit the videos. They insisted the videos had been “heavily edited,” despite the fact that the full video and transcript was easily obtainable. PPFA hired a high-powered PR firm to do damage control and there were veiled threats made to television stations to not show the videos.
There was also, of course, the expected defense of PPFA from the Obama administration, with White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest attacking the videos while admitting that no one in the White House had watched them. Hillary Clinton, currently the leading contender in the Democratic primary for president, told a reporter in New Hampshire that the videos were disturbing but quickly got back in line, defending PPFA.
A little more mystifying was the defense of Planned Parenthood by unions such as the AFL-CIO and the Services Employees International Union (SEIU). They most likely did so because Democratic leaders and allies like the unions don’t want to see a powerhouse like PPFA taken down just as the presidential election is heating up.
When the U.S. Senate tried to vote to defund PPFA, 46 Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block the vote, leaving the abortion giant still the beneficiary of a half-billion dollars of our tax dollars.
And to no one’s surprise, most in the “mainstream” media refused to air the videos or discuss them. A so that a few weeks after this all started, a Monmouth University poll found that 53% of the public had not even heard about the videos.
I’m sure you have talked about it, emailed links from NRL News Today stories about the videos to your family and friends, posted information on your Facebook page and other outlets. But we need to do more. We need to make sure that everyone knows what Planned Parenthood does to innocent unborn children.
The videos have touched hearts, and hopefully opened some minds, about what is happening to our unborn children. At the same time Ruth Marcus defended PPFA in her Washington Post column, she wrote, “Even for those who support abortion rights, there is a stomach-churning aspect to the surreptitiously taped conversations with Planned Parenthood officials — the coldblooded discussion, between bites of salad and sips of red wine, of “less crunchy” techniques to obtain specimens, and the precise placement of “graspers” to avoid having to “crush” a valuable body part. If you hear this and fail to squirm, there is something wrong with you.”
In his column entitled, “I Don’t Know if I’m Pro-Choice After Planned Parenthood Videos,” columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr., started out, “For the last 30 years, I’ve supported abortion rights. This year may be different.”
There are a lot of people re-thinking abortion and their support of PPFA. We need to take every opportunity we can to reach them now.
What can we do? National Right to Life will mount a nationwide grassroots campaign to educate Americans on the atrocities committed by PPFA which kills hundreds of thousands of babies every year and traffics in their body parts.
National Right to Life is unique among pro-life groups in that we work at three levels—national, state, and local. With our dedicated 50 state affiliates and 3,000 chapters, we are able to penetrate into local communities like no other group can. We can get the message to tens of millions of people and urge them to help us stop our tax dollars from fattening the coffers of any abortion provider.
And what powerful image can we use to get our message out? Babies, of course!
I challenge all our readers to take the “hug a baby” challenge. Post a picture of yourself holding a baby on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and any other outlet you have access to.
Slogans or hashtags? How about “You can’t put a price on my baby” or “Love, No Matter What” or “Life is Priceless.” Do you have a sonogram photo of your unborn child or grandchild? Use that and say “Planned Parenthood didn’t get this baby” or “Planned Parenthood can’t have this baby’s parts.” And when you take the Hug a Baby challenge, send a contribution to National Right to Life to help our nationwide campaign to educate on Planned Parenthood.
We’ll use flyers, radio ads, bulletin inserts, and many other ways that we can get information about Planned Parenthood into the hands of people who will care—once they know.
Babies represent life, love, happiness, optimism, innocence, goodness, and the future. Whereas Planned Parenthood brings death to more than 330,000 unborn children every year and darkness to the lives of their mothers, let’s put before America the happy smiling faces of babies who need us to be their voices.
You will hear more about this campaign in the next few days. Start taking those photos and get ready to show the world that “You Can’t Put a Price on Life.”