In US politics, pro-life people hate Planned Parenthood, and pro-choice people defend it.
Last night in the GOP primary debate, Donald Trump (who now claims to be pro-life, despite past statements that he's very pro-choice) got criticized for his support of Planned Parenthood. After calling Ted Cruz a liar, Trump bizarrely continued by saying that Planned Parenthood does wonderful things, thus freshly demonstrating that Cruz is right.
I've heard a lot of right-wing atheists, like many libertarians, complain about Republican opposition to abortion. It's a big sticking point that lures them leftward. What I don't hear them talk about as much is that Planned Parenthood should not receive taxpayer funding; that violates the proper role of government and taxes. But what I really don't see them saying is that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization.
Contrary to the typical dynamics, I'm pro-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood is not just a "neutral organization that provides abortions and other health services", as many people seem to imagine (without having done any research). It's a radical (and powerful) leftist institution which actively promotes evil agendas.
Planned Parenthood was founded by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Why? Because she disliked human beings. She liked abortion because she wanted fewer black, poor and stupid people to exist. She wanted to control and limit the human population and get rid of the types of people she considered undesirable. She also advocated sterilizing people and contraceptives. Abortion was one more tactic designed to promote the agenda of population control and race purification.
(This stuff is not controversial or seriously disputed. Research it if you're curious.)
The "pro-choice" position is disgusting. The issue is: is abortion murder? To reply to that with "it's a woman's choice" is absolutely stunning. Everyone should find this shocking and appalling.
The only defensible pro-abortion answer could be, "No, abortion is not murder."
I don't want to debate all the details and get into exactly where the line should be, but I will now tell you why I favor abortions in the first trimester:
I don't believe in God or the soul. I consider that mysticism. I look at the issue scientifically.
For murder to take place, there must be a human being which is murdered. I don't think a sperm or egg is a human being. And nor do I think an embryo is a human being.
What would it take for me to believe there is a human being capable of being murdered? At minimum, it would have to have a brain which has some electrical activity. Without the physical existence of a brain, which is doing something, there cannot be a human mind. And without a mind, there's no person. No mind means no consciousness. No mind means no one there to have preferences, to think, to say "I", to want to live.
I've noticed a lot of Democrat politicians say they are "personally against abortion", but want it to be legal. They also say they'd like abortion to be "safe, legal and rare". My question is: why?
If abortion isn't murder, then why are you personally against it? If abortion isn't murder, why do you want it to be rare?
What claims are there about abortion being bad, other than the issue of murder? What anti-abortion ideas do these people believe? In what non-murder way is abortion bad? They never explain and this has never made any sense.
The exceptions that even many pro-life people make to allow abortion are weird. Suppose that human life begins at conception and abortion is murder:
If abortion is murder, why should being raped make murder acceptable? Why should incest justify murder? If that's a human being in the womb, it doesn't matter how it got there, and how unwanted it may be, it's absolutely not OK to murder it.
The life of the mother exception is the only one that makes any sense. If the mother's life is in danger, then you'd have a consideration (a human life) that could actually matter when discussing killing a human being in the womb.
Some pro-life people would ask me: "How confident are you in your science? Do you really want to risk it? What's so great about abortion to be worth the risk that it's murder? Why not just let this issue go?"
The answer is that abortion is important. Having a child is a huge change to the life of the mother and father. Parenting is a really big deal. It absolutely makes enough difference for the abortion issue to be worth exploring.
Not everyone wants to have a child. And people who do want one may want their child later. And that's good. People are right to decide if and when they should start a family. Making good decisions about that is a big deal. Parenthood should indeed be "planned"! It deserves thought, organization, and being with the right co-parent.
Abortion can enable choosing a different person to marry who you get along with better. It can enable finishing your education. It can enable having a savings and keeping your finances under control your whole life, rather than having a kid early and struggling with money for decades. These are a big deal.
Abortion helps prevent the unfortunate situation of a man paying child support and a stressed single mom trying to cope. That's not a good situation. It happens. Abortions let some people avoid that fate.
Abortions make a big positive difference in some people's lives.
You may ask: Why can't people just use contraceptives? Aren't the people getting abortions irresponsible?
Contraceptives are not 100% effective. But, yes, many people getting abortions are irresponsible. So what? If you want to work to teach people to think better, live more responsibly, etc, go right ahead. That'd be great. Not letting them get an abortion will not help them.
You may ask: Do some people use abortion as a backup plan to help enable a more promiscuous lifestyle? Does it contribute to cads and sluts having drunken parties, rather than doing something more worthwhile with their time?
Yes. But the potential misuse of a technology is no reason to ban it. Medical technology, like plaster casts to help heal broken bones, enable people to be more reckless in their lives, but it's still a good thing.
You may ask: Why can't they just be abstinent if they aren't prepared to be a parent?
It's a matter of freedom. Many people have different values than you. Some live sinfully. Some live pretty responsibly but do have pre-marital sex.
On the premise that abortion isn't murder, then: it's a technology which helps some people's lifestyles. Whether those lifestyles are good or bad, as long as it's non-violent, non-criminal, non-rights-violating, they deserve liberty and tolerance. If you've got some suggestions about how to live better, go ahead and persuade people, but do not use the government to ban technologies.
Messages (11)
What evil agendas?
> It's a radical (and powerful) leftist institution which actively promotes evil agendas.
Other than having an awful founder and general political stuff like helping leftists get elected, what are some specific evil agendas that PP currently actively promotes?
Did you ever check out their website?
I just went there and clicked the About Us menu and then clicked the two most relevant sounding menu items: who they are, and initiatives. This is what they are advocating today:
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are
They go lobby the government to
> protect the health of young people by providing them with comprehensive sex education
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/advisory-boards-initiatives
And they have an initiative named "Green Choices":
> Green Choices supports the creation of a sustainable world by providing the information you need to make choices for better health and a greener environment — for you, your family, and your community.
If you click through it says stuff like: eat organic food, plastics are bad, and there are toxic chemicals in soap.
Non-abortion tax funding of Planned Parenthood would therefore include paying for:
1) PP lobbying the government to indoctrinate children with leftwing culture about sex, lifestyle and family
2) PP promoting environmentalism
Free Abortions !!
I think Planned Parenthood must be removed after disbanding all other social programs. There are a lot of irresponsible people who have children and expect the STATE to pay for all their needs. Why not give them free abortion to cut the costs of looking after people.
planned parenthood is a criminal leftist enterprise receiving taxpayer monies.
Why don't men and women stop fucking when they can't afford the results?
if the condom fails, they **can** afford morning after pill and/or abortion.
Was Margaret Sanger racist?
>> Planned Parenthood was founded by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger
I just read Margaret Sanger's profile at DiscoverTheNetworks and while she does indeed appear to have been a communist and eugenicist, I didn't see anything there about her being a racist.
The only place the word 'racist' appears on her page is in this sentence:
> As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler.
Okay, so she edited a journal that published people who were very racist. There can be multiple explanations for that. For example, maybe the papers they published in her journal advocated eugenics in general, not racism. I think if DiscoverTheNetworks had more damning evidence that she was a racist, they would have presented it.
The page also quotes from a letter in which Sanger wrote, "We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population". The page goes on to say (bold mine):
> Some anti-abortionists have interpreted the preceding sentence to mean that Sanger wished to deliberately enact a genocide against black people. Daniel Flynn addresses this notion as follows: “**Did Sanger intend to 'exterminate' blacks? Probably not.** In fact, with this letter she was actually trying to combat the notion that she sought to exterminate blacks; she wanted to enlist clergy to prevent misinformation about the program from spreading.... Regardless of intent, the effect of her program was nefarious enough—to suppress the black population.”
Being racist "in effect" isn't the same as being actually racist (that is, racist in intent). Otherwise IQ tests would be racist.
>> [Sanger] liked abortion because she wanted fewer black, poor and stupid people to exist.
Cite for Sanger wanting fewer black people specifically? It looks to me as if poverty and stupidity, not race, were Sanger's actual criteria for deciding whom to weed out.
Sanger wrote an essay, "We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds"
She openly talked about doing her eugenics by **race**. She spoke at a KKK meeting. Her colleagues said lots of nasty, racist stuff too.
You could easily have found info about this if you wanted to. Are you trying to pressure other people to do research for you because you're lazy?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/13/steve-deace-planned-parenthood-the-next-relic-from/
http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
the DTN article says e.g.:
> Also in 1939, Sanger turned her attention specifically to the reproductive practices of **black** Americans.
(emphasis added. and read the whole paragraph that comes from, or maybe even the whole page, before you demand cites for information found on the webpage you already found)
you should use multiple search terms, like e.g. "black" or "negro", before you jump into the fray to defend evil people and demand counter-arguments.
Was Margaret Sanger racist?
> Sanger wrote an essay, "We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds"
> She openly talked about doing her eugenics by **race**.
And that's your evidence that she's a racist? What evidence is there that she was using the word "race" there to refer to existing races like black, white, or asian? She just says she wanted a race of people who were not "unfit".
> She spoke at a KKK meeting.
Yes, among many other places. Sanger wrote:
>> "All over the world, in Penang and Skagway, in El Paso and Helsingfors, I have found women’s psychology in the matter of childbearing essentially the same, no matter what class, religion, or economic status. **Always to me any aroused group was a good group**, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing... In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”
I've seen no evidence that she accepted any of those offers.
> Also in 1939, Sanger turned her attention specifically to the reproductive practices of **black** Americans.
Maybe Sanger wanted to weed out "unfit" people (which to her included being poor). So, in the black community, Sanger found a convenient population of poor people to go after?
> Her colleagues said lots of nasty, racist stuff too.
So she worked with bad people to accomplish her bad agenda. Doesn't mean she shared all their beliefs. Vdare has published an article advocating disarming black people, but the FI newsletter links to their site. amren.com is explicitly racist, yet their hate crime map is good work (Ann Coulter links to it).
> http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/13/steve-deace-planned-parenthood-the-next-relic-from/
That article by Steve Deace misquotes Sanger. He claims Sanger said:
>> “(We) are seeking to assist the white race toward the elimination of the unfit (blacks).” (Birth Control and Racial Betterment, 1919)
But the only thing in Birth Control and Racial Betterment that contains the phrase "seeking to assist" is the first sentence, which reads, in full:
>>> Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.
Deace added the words white and black and doesn't show that his additions are consistent with Sanger's intended meaning.
Deace also added the word "white" to other quotes, such as:
>> Birth Control to create a (white) race of thoroughbreds
What evidence is there that Sanger intended that meaning?
Deace goes on to say:
>> In both word and deed, there has never been a more successful racist in America than Sanger and the Planned Parenthood she gave birth to. Together they have killed more black Americans than all the Confederate flags combined.
This sargues that Sanger's policies were racist *in effect*, not that they were racist in *intent*. But if discriminatory *effects* were enough to make one racist, wouldn't any employer be racist who hires based on IQ tests?
Hitler, for comparison, was a racist who intentionally targeted Jews for annihilation:
>>> Jewry is unqualifiedly a racial association and not a religious association... Rational anti-semitism['s] final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether.
Back to anon:
> http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
This is a compilation of two articles from other sources. The first article definitely does not argue that Sanger is a racist, at least, not using that word. It includes the word "racist" only once, in this sentence:
>> Sanger's other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists.
The second article is this one: http://womensenews.org/2001/07/sangers-legacy-reproductive-freedom-and-racism/ . It begins by saying (bold mine):
>> Despite Margaret Sanger’s contributions to birth control and hence women’s freedom and empowerment, her legacy is diminished by her sympathies with eugenics. This writer says that, like many modern feminists, **Sanger ignored class and race**.
So the second article explicitly says that Sanger *wasn't* racist against blacks. It concludes:
>> Sanger published the Birth Control Review at the same time that black men, returning from World War I, were lynched in uniform. That she did not see the harm in embracing exclusionary jargon about sterilization and immigration suggests that she was, at best, socially myopic.
you should stop.