Planned Parenthood is trying to give itself a public image makeover. Patricia Bainbridge is determined that America’s largest abortion provider and most vocal proponent of abortion won’t get away with it.
“Planned Parenthood is and always has been about changing the way people view human sexuality,” the chairman of Human Life International said at a Defend Life-sponsored talk in Ellicott City October 19.
In great part, said Bainbridge, they have succeeded in debasing our culture to the point where, for most teens and young adults (not to mention adults in general), sex is “just another recreational activity.”
But there has been push back.
“For the first time in their history, Planned Parenthood is running scared,” Bainbridge declared. Undercover exposés by Live Action and other groups have revealed Planned Parenthood employees giving false information to “clients” and aiding and abetting “pimps” in exploiting underage girls.
States have defunded Planned Parenthood to a total of $61 million. So the abortion organization is working hard to transform its image from mass baby-killer to kindly health care provider.
Never mind that 97.6 percent of its services to pregnant females are abortions. Or that Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Fact Sheet reported committing 329,445 surgical abortions in 2010. PPFA is now calling its clinics “health centers,” asserting that they provide a great variety of health services, of which abortion is only a miniscule part—3 percent, to be exact, said Bainbridge.
Their clinic on Howard Street in Baltimore, for example, is now the “Baltimore City Health Center,” according to Planned Parenthood of Maryland’s website. Bainbridge noted that Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director in Texas, calls the 3 percent claim “a gimmick.”
“That number is actually closer to 12 percent, but strategically skewed by unbundling family planning services so that each patient shows anywhere from 5 to 20 “visits” per appointment (i.e., 12 packs of birth control equals 12 visits), and doing the opposite with abortion visits, bundling them together so that each appointment equals one visit,” explains Johnson.
At PlannedParenthood.org, a long list of “General Health Care Services” includes items such as cholesterol screening, flu vaccines, and thyroid screening, which your local Planned Parenthood clinic “may” provide (call first to make sure, they advise).
“Most of these services you can get at your local mall,” Bainbridge observed: “In Maryland alone there are at least a dozen county health clinics that offer these services free.”
One of Planned Parenthood’s most notorious tactics is their claim that they perform mammograms when, in fact, not one of their clinics does; they merely refer clients to other facilities for them.
“I’m sick and tired of President Obama and others going around and saying, ‘Oh, if we defund Planned Parenthood, women won’t be able to get mammograms!” Bainbridge fumed.
In the meantime, Planned Parenthood works tirelessly and aggressively to propagandize children and teens and thus build its customer base for contraception and abortion.
“Planned Parenthood really believes there are no rights or wrongs with any sexual behavior, as long as it is consensual,” said Bainbridge.
Masturbation, oral sex, sodomy—they’re all okay. In a book touted by Planned Parenthood, Girls and Sex, by Wardell Pomeroy, an associate of the discredited “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey, the question is asked, “Are necrophilia [sex with a corpse] and bestiality [sex with an animal] okay?” The answer: it depends on your point of view.
Planned Parenthood recruits college students by organizing campus groups called Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood (there are groups at Towson University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Maryland College Park). At Vox events, said Bainbridge, “They have tables with ‘goodies,’ such as penis-shaped lollipops.”
Planned Parenthood is on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Smart Phones. They also run “Safe is Sexy” spots on MTV, VH1, TBS and the Internet, appealing to their young audience with shock humor. One shows a cartoon couple having sex in bed, with two “angels” sitting on the bedpost behind them. The male “angel” has a moral concern: does the guy in bed have “protection”?
“That’s blasphemy, as far as I’m concerned!” Bainbridge exclaimed.
Another spot shows an actual (not cartoon) man wearing a condom with his penis hanging out of his pants, proudly sauntering all over public places as people stare at him. The voice-over cautions that you should be proud to wear a condom, but save it for sexually intimate occasions.
In addition to their own website and materials, Planned Parenthood receives support and advocacy from 140 organizations, including the Girl Scouts, the American Red Cross, the YWCA, and the Children’s Defense Fund. The entertainment media and magazines also help Planned Parenthood spread their message.
“Even the October 2012 Family Circle magazine had a favorable article on them!” bemoaned Bainbridge. The article was titled, “How to Have the Sex Talk with your Teen.”
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“All month long, we’re teaming up with Planned Parenthood to bring you advice on this essential conversation,” Family Circle told its readers.
Bainbridge offers this advice to pro-lifers who want to expose and oppose Planned Parenthood:
- Know the facts and be able to document them. Study their annual reports, monitor them on Facebook and on their website. Do internet searches on them.
- Sign up for their mailing list if you’re comfortable with that.
- Know where their centers are and where their fundraising events are being held, and be there to hand out information.
- Know which politicians support them, and who is on your local Planned Parenthood Board of Directors and expose them.
- Know your audience—friend, family, fellow Catholic, “cafeteria Catholic”—and gear your argument toward them.
- Don’t focus on Margaret Sanger; they will say, “That was then, this is now.” Stick with what Planned Parenthood is doing today.
- Use scientific facts. Don’t say, “I believe life begins at conception”; say, “Life begins at conception.”
Finally, Bainbridge urged, take heart from the advice of Archbishop Charles Chaput: “If we stand up to evil, we may lose. If we don’t stand up to evil, we will lose.”
Reprinted with permission from the Defend Life Nov. – Dec. 2012 newsletter.
