Two wildly contrasting views of Planned Parenthood have surfaced in recent weeks. The first is that of Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who sees Planned Parenthood as the personification of darkness and wants to cut off all government aid to this medical provider. The vehicle to do this is H.R. 217, the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act. The bill would deny community women's health centers the ability to provide vital services like contraception, cancer screenings and breast exams.
It is always strange that many men, particularly religious men, seem to believe they know better than women how women should live. There is great irony in this. It is more than a little disturbing that people who can never experience the reality of an unwanted pregnancy are always telling the woman what she should do. It is easy to take a strict moral position when there is no cost to the person taking it.
As a person who has been a Protestant minister for 50 years, I certainly do not know what is best for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy. But everything I have learned about religious compassion in this long career says that we should trust the woman to make the decision. Why is it so hard to do that? Entire religious denominations rush to Washington and every state capital to do all they can to keep women, especially poor women, from getting the reproductive health services they need.
A very different view of Planned Parenthood was taken recently by Nicole Hardy, in an article ("Single, Female, Mormon, Alone") in the Jan. 7 New York Times. Unmarried at 35, she had lived by the strict code of the Mormon Church: no sex before marriage. In a society where most couples live together before marriage, she decided to change her life. She went to Planned Parenthood, despite all the bad things it was supposed to represent --condoms and abortions. She was stunned to discover the (her words) "tenderness," "empathy" and "compassion" she found there. She said they treated her body as though it was "sacred." She said she finally understood why so many frightened and misused women had come there.
A good part of my ministry, and that of thousands of other ministers and rabbis, has been spent in helping this embattled agency. Clergy have been doing this since the 1920s. The other clergy can all speak for themselves, but I will tell anyone that I have found more compassion in the affiliates of Planned Parenthood than I have found in many churches.
Representative Pence and his colleagues are dead wrong. Planned Parenthood is the best friend women can have.
Bob Cesca: The Republican War Against Women
Mike Pence: Planned Parenthood Videos 'Should Be A Scandal To ...
Planned Parenthood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Single, Female, Mormon, Alone - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com
http://filipinofreethinkers.org/2010/12/08/when-does-life-begin/
Granted, I can only REALLY get away with saying this because I'm basically pro-choice.
...."Planned Parenthood is the best friend women can have"
---------------------------
That is unless you are a pre-natal female. Almost half of all pre-natal girls are aborted in China. That's called eugenics.
"China has become the second country, after New Zealand, to become officially recognized as a qualified member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)." China's Family Planning Association passed IPPF's qualification authentication process.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-10/30/content_720378.htm
Margaret Sanger, the founder and president of PPFA said:
..."Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems."...
-- Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda."
Birth Control Review , October 1921, page 5.
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml
I agree with Mike Pence, “who sees Planned Parenthood as the personification of darkness." We should cut off PPFA. Americans don't want to fund abortion or abortion providers. PPFA solicits abortions with tax funds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wdDQzOt94M
It always amazes me that "Christians" particularly Clergy, would be advocates of premarital sex and abortion, when scripture clearly oppose it.
Pence and partners are fighting for the rights of all pre-natal children, half of which are female. Pence is the true women's rights advocate. Human life begins at conception, that is scientific fact, who are we to end it?
Exo 21:1 These are the ordinances that you shall set before them:
Exo 21:22 DRB If men quarrel, and one strike a woman with child and she miscarry indeed, but live herself: he shall be answerable for so much damage as the woman's husband shall require, and as arbiters shall award.
Deu 5:17 DRB Thou shalt not kill.
(Psa 139:15) My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the womb
(Psa 139:16) Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.
(Job 31:15) Did not he who made me in the womb make them? And did not one fashion us in the womb?
(Isa 44:2) Thus says the LORD who made you, who formed you in the womb and will help you: Do not fear, O Jacob my servant, Jeshurun whom I have chosen.
(Isa 44:24) Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb: I am the LORD, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who by myself spread out the earth;
http://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFVt8yLuyUs
The Mexico City Policy sends hundreds of millions of tax dollars overseas to fund abortion. Obama passed am executive order forcing taxpayer funding of embryonic stem cell research and he gave $50 million in tax funds to UNFPA. Obamacare provides tax funded abortion. Obama signed a bill that overturned the 13-year-long ban on tax funded abortions in the nations capital.
..."Planned Parenthood receives about a third of its money in government grants and contracts ($349.6 million in the 2008 fiscal year). In the 2007–08 Annual Report, clinic income totalled $374.7 million and miscellaneous operating revenues $68.9 million."....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood
“Second“ China’s Abortion policy is Planned Parenthood's founders ideal vision. They are one of only a few of IPPF certified members in good standing.
“Third†A company charter continues in perpetuity, like the constitution. PPFA still perpetuates, Margaret Sanger's, vision and mission statement.
“And†yes according to Abby Johnson a former Planned Parenthood Clinic Director PPFA does solicit abortions, especially from minors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wdDQzOt94M
Organized religion=the bane of civilization. There wouldn't BE a thing known as 'community' without women. When will men 'get' that? #GetOutOfThatManCave
They're only trying to raise the absolutist hyperbole of 'the abortion issue' cause that's the best way for the Right to keep feeding their billionaire masters while the common people suffer and are divided over religious/ideological drama, of course.
Control of women and women's bodies has always been tempting to some who want to control people by their most intimate places and decisions, even while claiming to be about 'freedom and personal responsibility,' ...but it's no more promoting morality than screaming daytime talk shows ever have.
Just *moralism* and lowest common denominators.
I've tried to say it before, but as Pagan clergy, I try to assure people that the way to honor 'life' (especially in the way they equate 'life' with 'spawning then being on your own in a zero-sum dog-eat-dog, what, me-big-money-actually give what you paid for' way the Religious Right brings about,) ...well the way to *really* honor life, and indeed the sacredness of reproduction is not this vitriol, hatred, disgust, and religious tyranny, but actually honoring the process and mothers and the experience and the community obligations that come from there, not just in scorn, but from the *heart,* and from *real* options, not offering women a choice of punishments for being women. (Then imposing straight sex anyway.)
Wow.
Unless I'm mistaken, China has a lot of folks.
There is no statute of limitations for the "crime" of murder you know.
Should it be your reported 1,500,000 X (however many years) women only, that spend their lives in prison for choosing murder over your people's helping hand, or should those assisting physicians and staff be included. Would your God given right to retribution be extended to the family, friends or others that may have been involved with the planning/counseling leading up to the crime??
But....after further thought: Our nation does have the largest prison system on earth....kick out those pot heads that have found God and......by golly, johmich5, .........think of all the jobs that would have to be refilled.......Hey man, do you think those people in the business of religion and the Republican party will pay us for this idea?!?!
Simple.