Planned Parenthood and Politics

President John Adams was right when he said, "Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

The facts about abortion, and the relationship between easily accessed abortions and politics, are patently plain. There is no debate about these facts. Let no pro-life Christian be deceived about them either. A 2007 Wall Street Journal report noted that Planned Parenthood received over $1 billion in revenues. Read that figure again. This means Planned Parenthood is big, really big. How much of this revenue came from tax-payer monies? Answer: $336 million, or almost 34%.

Planned Parenthood is putting an estimated $10 million into candidates for political office this year. Obviously not a penny will go to an anti-abortion candidate so we know where the money is going. The presidential race draws particular interest since most believe that there will be more appointments to the Supreme Court in the next four years.

The political wing of Planned Parenthood is called the "Action Fund" and this fund has given massive support to Senator Barack Obama. What has Obama given to Planned Parenthood in return? The most consistent voting record in the nation for pro-choice legislation including his highly questionnable record in the Illinois Senate before he entered the U. S. Senate. One thing Barack Obama has never waffled on for one second is abortion. He says he doesn’t like it but he supports it totally. And he has even said he wants his own daughters to have the right to not have an unwanted child if they ever make that decision. No one, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, has come even remotely close to such a consistent stance on abortion as Senator Obama. One group that can trust him to stand by them is the pro-abortion folks.

Add to all of this the fact that Planned Parenthood helps women in one of every four abortions and you can see the connection here very clearly. This is not a pro-McCain partisan statement. It is, as Adams would remind us, simply "the facts." It strikes me as very sad that the "life" issue has become less and less important to many Christians. It would appear that we care less about stopping the killing of millions of unborn children than we once did. Maybe the economy has us all focused on our pensions and savings accounts more than on justice and mercy. I don’t know this for sure but I am personally persuaded that most of the Christians I know seem "tired" with regard to this issue and thus they are not nearly as committed to it in public as they once were. While I respect some of the nuances of this thorny debate, and thus understand how we can disagree about it among real Christians, I do not understand why so many who say they are really "pro-life" seem to not care that much about changing our culture of death. I am not an apocalyptic thinker about this issue, at least not in an emotionally charged way, but I am convinced that every single abortion helps to poison our culture with more death and thus one less life. The stubborn facts are these—we have killed a generation of workers and leaders and we seem to have not even noticed any more.

One of the primary ways that abortion has become more acceptable to younger Christians is found in the argument made by the left day-in and day-out. This argument, made by evangelicals like Jim Wallis, treats abortion as still "important" but then equates this issue with the war in Iraq and thus makes them the same. Then when this is further linked with several other "moral" issues" then concern for abortion simply gets "lost" in the huge moral shuffle. This kind of "ethical equalizing" is all too common among evangelicals. Thank God the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t buy it for one moment. In this instance evangelicals are their own worst enemies and the absence of a strong teaching authority makes them vulnerable to arguments that Rome has sorted out with clarity and deep sophistication not known to the influential evangelical left.

By the way CareNet, an organization that is working to save lives and protect mothers, gets no funds from any agencies or government sponsored groups at all. If Obama, and leaders like him, really did believe that this was a moral issue then they would at least not support funding abortions with your money and mine. One could argue that abortion should remain legal without taking my money to perform them. But it doesn’t work that way. Does anyone care anymore? Will it make any difference in 2008? I highly doubt it.