Apparently they’re feeling the heat.
After months of pressure from the public, state governments, and even Congress, Planned Parenthood has made their first policy change in response to the videos which showed them negotiating payment for the hearts, spines, eyeballs, and lungs of the babies they kill.
Cecile Richards, the President of Planned Parenthood, announced this new change in a letter to the National Institutes of Health.
Did they decide they decide to stop killing babies or harvesting their organs?
Unfortunately not.
According to the letter, they will not stop the “important work” of parting off babies because “we will never bow to political pressure and we will never back down from advancing women’s health every way we can.”
The change they announced is that Planned Parenthood plans to give away the baby parts for free.
How generous.
Planned Parenthood is a “non-profit” organization that has reported “revenues in excess of expenses”(e.g., profits) of $750 million over the last 10 years. During that same time, they have received more than $4 billion from taxpayers.
Unlike most not-for profit organizations, they aren’t in the practice of giving things away without compensation.
This may be their first venture into actual philanthropy, but in a sick, Halloween joke kind of way. “Free baby eyes.”
Only they aren’t joking.
They had to make this change because selling baby parts is illegal. This is their attempt to avoid the legal challenge of trafficking in human body parts but it does nothing to address the underlying problem.
We all understand that research on deceased human beings is something that happens commonly and often ethically even if the uninitiated would find it uncomfortable to be part of the details.
The difference, obviously, is that in the case of the organs donated by Planned Parenthood, the people involved were killed because their life was deemed inconvenient. So-called tissue donation is an attempt to create a social good out of a moral wrong. Science is awesome, but it does not have the power to make something evil suddenly good.
The percentage of Americans who have an unfavorable view of Planned Parenthood has almost doubled in the last three years.
This certainly wouldn’t be the first time a large industry has attempted to do something charitable in response to a declining public image, but I suspect the public will be underwhelmed by this particular act of generosity.
The good news in all of this is that Planned Parenthood is responding.
They are on their heels because they should be. The curtain has been lifted.
This is their way of insisting that “it’s legal” which is often the defense you make when you know that “it’s wrong”. But the fact that they were forced to make the change should simply encourage all of us to keep the pressure on.
It is clearly working.
Call your Washington State legislators at 1-800-562-6000 and ask them why an organization that has reported $750 million in profits over the last 10 years needs taxpayer funds. You can also email your elected officials and ask them the same question. If you know your home address, our tool will tell you who represents you and make it really easy to email them all at once.
If you don’t want your tax dollars to go to Planned Parenthood, you need to let your elected officials know. Let them know what a better use of those funds would be.
If we, as citizens, continue to do what we have always done we can expect the same results. If we all do something small that we have never done before, we just might make see some real change happen.
Let’s do this.
