Religious Left Blesses New Planned Parenthood Facility in Schenectady, New York

The following opinion piece first appeared in The Sunday Gazette (Schenectady, New York) in February 2008.

While the religious right was protesting abortion on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade (January 22), the religious left was praying over and blessing the new Planned Parenthood Mohawk Hudson (PPMH) facility in Schenectady. What kind of prayers does one say over a building where mothers go to have their unborn children sliced, diced, salined and hoovered out of their wombs? All I could think of was a perverse rendering of the "Hail Mary." Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the defruiting of thy womb.

Prayers by pro-abortion clergy are not new. More than twenty-five years ago, Bishop John Taylor tried to get a prayer recognized by the Church of England that said, "Into your hands we commit in trust the developing life that we have cut short. Look in kindly judgment on the decision that we have made..." So to see the radical religious left praying over a Planned Parenthood clinic was not surprising. And while pro-abortion supporters have tried to silence religious opponents of abortion by saying that abortion is not a religious issue, the religious left continues to play a major role in defending "reproductive rights," even though what goes on in Planned Parenthood clinics rarely results in reproduction.

But when the religious left was declaring that 1040 State Street was, like some Indian burial mound, sacred real estate, they were not only blessing the right to abort, they were also blessing things which are antithetical to their beliefs.

For example, the religious left is generally against big business. Nevertheless, PPMH while technically non-profit, is very profitable. According to PPMH's 2006 tax return, PPMH took in over twelve million dollars in 2005 and had almost seven million in net assets at the end of the year. In 2005 PPMH paid twenty-eight employees more than $50,000 a year. I wonder how many businesses in Schenectady with the same revenue as PPMH can afford to pay $50,000-$150,000 a year to so many employees? And PPMH is only one of hundreds of franchises of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Nor do the prophets of the left see any inconsistency in blessing an organization that owns more than $250,000 worth of stocks in corporations like IBM, Merck and Pfizer. In 2005 PPMH's conscience did not twinge when it accepted and sold 195 shares of Halliburton, the number one Iraqi war profiteer and 768 shares of Exxon-Mobil stock, even though the Center For Corporate Policy in Washington DC claims that Exxon-Mobil is one of the ten top profiteers from the war in Iraq. PPMH also accepted and sold 4504 shares of GE which profits from the war through Department of Defense contracts.

You would think too that the religious left would save its blessings for truly charitable organizations. PPMH's tax return reveals that it spent a miserly $13,086 on charity in 2005. That was the amount spent on patient assistance. Planned Parenthood is not the great lover of the poor as people think. Most of its services are paid for by its clients, insurance companies and our tax dollars. In 2005, PPMH collected more than 6.5 million dollars from its clients and their insurance companies.

Then there is the separation of Church and State issue that the religious left is always raising. I have a feeling that the religious right would be excoriated if they blessed an adoption center that received money from the government, yet more than twenty-five percent of PPMH's revenues for 2005, over four million dollars, came from the government.

Finally, there is the problem of Planned Parenthood's founder--Margaret Sanger. Planned Parenthood continually tries to sanitize Sanger's writings. I am currently reading Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization. In one place she calls the blind, deaf, mute, insane, and mentally handicapped the "dead weight of human waste." As a believer in Eugenics, Sanger said that one of the aims of Eugenics was to show us "that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."

While Planned Parenthood claims to have repudiated some of Sanger's views, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Recalling the howls of the religious left when Ronald Reagan visited a cemetery where some SS soldiers were buried, I am positive they would be making the same arguments I am making if the religious right blessed an institution whose founder believed in Eugenics.

A few months ago, Paul Drisgula of PPMH wrote a Viewpoint piece arguing that abortion should not be segregated from the rest of health care; nevertheless, he allowed the religious left to bless a new facility that does just that. If Drisgula believed what he wrote, his new facility would have a maternity ward as well as an abortuary. With a maternity ward pro-lifers might begin to believe that PPMH is really pro-choice not pro-abortion and that it cares about all of life, not just the unfertilized and the unborn. Bible thumping Baptists, bead rattling Catholics, even pro-life atheists (see www.godlessprolifers.org) might be persuaded to place their hands on such a building and call it holy ground.

Say amen, somebody!