A reply to Rev. Nelson’s article onPlanned Parenthood 11-21-15
We disagree with most of Rev. J.
Herbert Nelson's article on Planned Parenthood in its assumptions, and in its
conclusions. His article contains
factual errors as well as poor logic and theology. Never-the-less, we can all agree that
attitudes half a century ago that shamed and penalized women for having
non-marital sex (especially if exposed by pregnancy) while ignoring the equally
sinful behavior of the men involved were unjust. We can also agree that men
need to take responsibility for the children they sire and that child support
laws need to be enforced. Yet, injustice towards one group of human beings
(women) can never be the basis for advocating a larger injustice towards
another group of human beings (the preborn).
“HEALTH SERVICES”
Before we can even consider the other
“services” Planned Parenthood might or might not provide, we must first
recognize that abortion is very important to the organization. Indeed, please note that the very top subject
mentioned on the home page of the Planned Parenthood website is
“ABORTION.” Let’s look at each of the
other purported “health services” Rev. Nelson lists:
Parenting Skills
Far from providing parenting skills or
resources for new parents, Planned Parenthood limits parenting support to
sexual education, such as timing of teen sexual activity, promotion of birth
control, and avoiding abusive relationships. Their website does briefly discuss
the need for open communication and the need for parental limit setting and
monitoring, but we have to wonder how this fits in with their opposition to
parental notification laws.
Counseling
Rather than providing counseling that
empowers and dignifies women in their reproductive choices, Planned Parenthood
has been caught on tape counseling underage children on how to hide an abortion
(which is an invasive medical procedure) from their parents and how to hide
statutory rape from parents and authorities. Sex traffickers have been
"counseled" on how to get abortions for the young girls they are
prostituting, and while it is true that Planned Parenthood promotes birth
control for those not pregnant, pregnancy counseling primarily consists of
convincing women to have an abortion: 97% of the pregnant women who go to
Planned Parenthood get an abortion.
Mammograms
Planned Parenthood has never done a
single mammogram. Their director has admitted it and their website (fine print)
says in essence that they refer women to other sites to receive mammograms.
Many local community health centers, which outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics
ten to one, actually do provide mammograms.
(http://democratsforlife.org/index.php/articles-and-op-eds/press-releases/890-
democrats-for-life-supports-defunding-planned-parenthood)
Birth Control
True, however, birth control is also
available at community health clinics, which do not participate in the abortion
industry.
STI (sexually transmitted infections)
testing and treatment
It is true that Planned Parenthood does
provide these services, but as Christians, we are horrified that the abortion
provider would give young people who are infected by the HIV (AIDS) virus this
advice:
"Sharing
your HIV status is called disclosure. Your decision about whether to disclose
may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and
how to disclose your HIV status. You know best if and when it is safe for you
to disclose your status. There are many reasons that people do not share their
HIV status. [...] People in long-term relationships who find out they are
living with HIV sometimes fear that their partner will react violently or end
the relationship."
(http://www.ippf.org/resource/Healthy-Happy-and-Hot-young-peoples-guide-rights)
Such advice encourages those with a disease
that could literally kill their sexual partners to withhold such information
from them. It is not only irresponsible but immoral.
Dr. Nelson says that PP is known as a
provider of low cost healthcare for poor women, but the only forms of “healthcare”
listed on their website are those related to sex such as the "Morning
After Pill," Birth Control, Abortion, and STIs. Rev. Nelson’s assertion
that PP provides other medical services to children is patently false, unless
one were to consider the below-mentioned hiding of victims of sex trafficking
and statutory rape to be "medical services to children."
One of the authors of this response
(PLJ), as a member of her local county Board of Health, can confidently state
that her local health department offers far more in health care to poor women
than does Planned Parenthood, including immunizations, treatment for diabetes
and hypertension, nutrition counseling and WIC as well as all of the true
health care (such as STI testing and treatment) offered by Planned Parenthood.
This is true for other such county and municipal clinics nationwide, with the
comfort that they do not offer the killing procedures that Planned Parenthood
headlines: abortion and the morning after pill. In addition, her health
department, like a large number of the over 13,000 local health departments, is
located in a part of town close to where many poor women live. If the money
given to Planned Parenthood through government contracts was redirected to
local health departments, more poor women would be served.
ABORTION FUNDING
The extent to which Planned Parenthood
uses federal money for abortions is hotly debated. The abortion provider might
have cleverly succeeded in obscuring the contribution of public funds to the
killing of unwanted children through abortion, the fact remains that such
governmental money aids them I providing abortions--even if indirectly.
Approximately 60% of Planned Parenthood's revenue is derived from private
donations. Although technically prohibited from utilizing federal funds for
non-abortion services, Planned Parenthood maximizes the extent to which those
private donations find abortions by utilizing federal funds for non-abortion
services--basically freeing up a greater share of privately donated money for
abortion. In addition, they do not count abortificients (such as "the
morning after pill") in their numbers of abortions provided, although such
drugs act in part by ending the life of the embryo. What about Planned
Parenthood's claim that abortions comprise only 3% of the services they
provide? It's another instance of playing games with numbers. According Rachael
Larimore, senior editor of Slate, (the 3% number is) "most meaningless
abortion statistic ever:" She goes on to admit "[I]t’s easy to
calculate, as the Weekly Standard did, that Planned Parenthood gets at least a
third of its clinic income—and more than 10 percent of all its revenue,
government funding included—from its abortion procedures. Ask anyone who runs a
for-profit business or nonprofit charity if something that brings in one-third
of their revenue is “central” to their endeavor, and the answer is likely to be
yes. So yes, abortion is central to what Planned Parenthood does."
(https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/ 2015/09/a-comprehensive-guide-to-planned-parenthood-
funding#sthash.m6UT2lYM.dpuf).
In addition, Planned Parenthood
transfers millions of dollars to its lobbying arm, the Planned Parenthood
Action Fund (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/
2015/09/Planned-Parenthood-Chairman-Memo.pdf), to promote abortion and to try
to shut down pregnancy care centers. These centers are privately funded,
primarily through local congregations and Christians. Unlike Planned
Parenthood, they offer counseling that actually helps the family--mother,
father, and child, including children yet to be born. They give a woman ongoing
support both throughout her pregnancy and many also have parenting classes.
Many minister to the father as well as to the mother and encourage men to step
up to their responsibility. They encourage lifestyle changes for sexually
active girls, recognizing that sexual activity outside marriage does not have
to be on ongoing pattern. In the US, the main correlate of poverty is single
parenthood, which often is a consequence of premarital sex. To break the cycle
of poverty, we must go to the root cause and teach our children the
self-control and respect for themselves and others whom God created and reserve
sexual activity for marriage. Planned Parenthood and its allies were successful
in their efforts to limit the pro-life, pro-family work of California pregnancy
resource centers.
ABORTION AND THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Rev. Nelson is more correct than he
realizes (and perhaps more than he intends) in his assertion that Presbyterians
first struggled with the issue of abortion in 1970. This does not mean that the
church was silent on the subject of abortion, but rather it is true because
prior to 1970, all Presbyterian denominations understood the biblical and
historic Christian view of life as being a gift of God and eschewed abortion.
Orthodox scholar Alexander Webster writes, "It (abortion) is one of only
several moral issues on which not one dissenting opinion has ever been
expressed by the Church Fathers.”
The Didache,
which probably dates from the early second century A.D., commands, "Thou
shalt not murder a child by abortion," and not even the divisions that
rocked the church in the Protestant Reformation touched Christian views on
abortion. John Calvin wrote that ‘the foetus, though enclosed in
the womb of its mother, is already a human being.” He went on to say in
reference to Exodus 21:22-25 that “If it seems more horrible to kill a man in
his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure
refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a foetus
in the womb before it has come to light.” The condemnation of abortion
continued in the American Presbyterian church when the General Assembly of 1869
called abortion a crime against humanity, and the General Assemblies of 1962
and 1965 both explicitly stated that human life was to be protected from
conception and that while birth control was acceptable, abortion was not a
matter between a woman and her physician but rather should be restrained by the
law.
Reverend Nelson writes of being at the
2012 General Assembly while “Commissioners discussed an overture titled Calling
the Church to a New Way Forward on the Issue of Pregnancies and Abortion.” Presbyterians Pro-Life was also there, and we
noted that as so frequently happens, there was no substantive debate on this
issue. Rather, the Health Issues Committee erroneously inferred “peace” from
those of us who would protect all of our brothers and sisters and who grieve
the denomination’s capitulation to the abortion culture. Perhaps their inference was because despite
our grief and shame for the denomination, we have consistently expressed our
dissent decently and in order without demonstrations, picketing, or marches (in
contrast to some who have lost votes on other matters). But do not ever mistake our decency for
peace, because we are not at peace with this policy and we cannot be at peace
so long as it exists in its current form.
Even the most casual observer can see
that far from “relative peace” on the issue of the deliberate killing of our
most vulnerable fellow humans, almost every year there is at least one overture
from a presbytery calling for a change in the 1992 PC(USA) abortion policy. How
can the 1992 PC(USA) policy possibly bring “peace” when it is internally inconsistent and
further is not followed by the PC(USA)? The Policy states:
1. “That
no mission funds be used in violation of conscience on this issue”–yet the
portion of the tithe of an objecting PC(USA) member that pays your
salary for you to defend abortion is using mission
funds in violation of conscience. The funds that support ACWC and ACSWP in
promoting the acceptance of abortion are mission funds used in violation of
the conscience of those who oppose
abortion. The per capita that pays the medical benefits for
Presbytery, Synod, and GA (PMA) staff, violates dissenters’ conscience because
the benefits plan pays for abortion on demand, without restriction. We realize
that the 1992 policy also says that the Washington Office is allowed to promote
GA policy of supporting the avaiabiity of abortion, but it is impossible to do
this while at the same time not using mission funds in violation of dissenters’
conscience. The 1992 policy is
inherently contradictory and impossible to carry out.
2. The
policy states that “henceforth all publications on abortion shall give both
positions found in the 1992 Policy” (i.e. Position A and Position B), yet every
publication produced by the PC(USA) has only given Position B (that a woman’s
choice is paramount); the recognition that the baby is a gift of God who should
be protected and provided for, and that killing the unborn baby is not
justified (Position A) has not been stated as one of our beliefs in any
publication since the 1992 policy was passed.
We agree that the term “pro-choice” is
a poor one, and we wonder if Rev. Nelson was influenced more than he knows by
the campaign launched in 2013 by Planned Parenthood to distance itself from the
“pro-choice label” (which ironically, it invented in the 20th
Century so that the odious word “abortion” would be erased from the minds of
the American public). His arguments against the “watered down” labels sound
remarkably like those advanced by Planned Parenthood, which according to BuzzFeed,
“hopes to move beyond such terms entirely and present abortion as something too
complicated to be divided into two sides.”
BuzzFeed reports that “[a] soon-to-be-released Planned Parenthood
video takes this new approach, casting labels like pro-life and pro-choice as
limiting and abortion as a complex and personal decision.”
(http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/
planned-parenthood-moving-away-from-choice#.en9RbXoA6)
But it is absolutely crucial to
accurately define one’s position. The term “pro-choice” was initially chosen by
abortion proponents to move the discussion from the killing of a fetus in the
womb to the issue of a woman’s autonomy but the term is meaningless without
specifying exactly what the choice is. Some people favor the “choice” of killing
children prenatally and can honestly be called pro-abortion. Others would
better be described as condoning (though maybe not actively supporting) the
killing of children prenatally “in certain circumstances,” but the fact is that
a baby still dies, no matter what the label. Rev. Nelson is right that when God
brings a child into the world, the lives of parents become complicated. Abortion, on the other hand, is quite
straightforward: the child is human from
the moment of fertilization, and abortion at any stage of pregnancy snuffs out
that life. If Rev. Nelson were truly to
champion an enlightened engagement of the church in the nuances and
complexities inherent in our world of unwanted children, he would urge the
church to reject such a primitive “solution” as eliminating the unwanted life,
rather than compassionately addressing the issues of injustice, inequity, and
pain in which many of these children are conceived. For example, Rev. Nelson points out that a woman
who finds herself pregnant after having been violated deserves special
understanding, but he must not realize that many, many women who have been
violated by rape or incest consider abortion as a second
act of violence. And abortion, if nothing else, is surely an act of violence
against the child. Does not Scripture forbid the killing of a child for the
sins of its father? Would not it be better for the Church to surround such
women with healing, care, and support rather than referring her to an
abortionist to make the “problem go away?”
This way of looking at rape/incest is the nuanced way and as Christians,
we must struggle with the fact that following God’s plan is not always easy,
yet it is always right.
Similarly, when we consider the issue
of “choice,” it seems strange to that Rev. Nelson would promote abortion as
solely a woman’s choice while at the same time decrying the irresponsibility of
men. Too many men consider abortion an easy out from their responsibilities as
fathers, and the evidence is overwhelming that those who would exploit women
(sex traffickers, pedophile, rapists, and perpetrators of domestic violence)
see abortion as the perfect solution for any pregnancies resulting from their
abuse. Many men may want to provide for
their children but are denied the opportunity--even if they are married to the
mother. If we were to discuss the
numbers of grandparents who are would be all-too-willing to support their
grandchildren, but are not able to because their daughters “chose” to kill the
children, the numbers would become staggering.
We certainly pray that all Christians
would receive all human life as a blessing from God, and not a curse. We pray that all human beings have life and
have it abundantly. That prayer cannot be answered by condoning the intentional
killing of children prior to birth or by promoting and protecting those who
kill children for hire.
Patricia Lee June, M.D.
Martha E. Leatherman, M.D.
Comments
Post a Comment
All comments are reviewed before they post.