By Maria Gallagher, Legislative Director
gallagher@paprolife.org
The Planned Parenthood media blitz appears to be in full swing. One entertainment magazine profiles the abortion business’ president…another offers kudos to an actress for her fundraising on behalf of the abortion giant.
The September issue of Glamour magazine continues the publicity push with “Just Another Day at the Office,” an inside look at a Planned Parenthood facility.
The article does not indicate how many abortions are performed each year at the New York facility—“termination” is the preferred word in the piece, as if a baby was just given her walking papers.
One photograph with the caption, “Baby News” displays a series of pictures of babies born to Planned Parenthood clients. Of course, missing are the pictures of the children who never had the chance to be born because of the “work” performed here.
The article profiles workers who “jump up and down for joy” when one reveals she is pregnant and who “celebrate each other’s birthdays!” Again, the fact that some girls never have the opportunity to celebrate a birthday because their lives are taken in utero is completely ignored.
One Planned Parenthood employee is described as a “devout Catholic” who has served as a “youth minister at her church.” When she interviewed for her job more than a decade ago, she did not know “exactly what services Planned Parenthood provides.” She feels that God has her at Planned Parenthood “for a purpose.” This, despite the fact that Catholic teaching clearly states that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life and is, in fact, a grave evil in our society.
One vignette depicts a father coercing his daughter into having an abortion. The young woman decides not to have an abortion that day, but returns a week later, saying she is now certain she wants an abortion. But the sonogram reveals an important truth—she has missed the 13.6 weeks cut-off for abortions at this facility. The article fails to mention how well-developed an unborn baby is at this stage, or whether any follow-up questions were asked about the pressure her father had been exerting for her to abort.
Those facts are apparently inconvenient for the Hollywood-style workplace drama the magazine and Planned Parenthood are trying to portray.
A worker whose mother left the convent to become a wife and mother sees her job at Planned Parenthood as a spiritual calling. She wants to uplift women. But participating in the taking of innocent human lives is not a spiritual act. And, as women who regret their abortions will tell you, the loss of their motherhood through such an unnatural act is far from empowering. Take, for instance, the women of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign (
www.silentnomoreawareness.org), who speak of being left bereft, sometimes barren, and inconsolably grieving children lost to abortion.
The fact is, no matter how much their publicists, media allies, and employees try, Planned Parenthood cannot normalize abortion. It is an inherently cruel act which ends a child’s life and can deeply wound a child’s mother. One would hope that, in time, the workers profiled in the article will open their eyes to that fact, and will leave the brutal business, as so many others have done.
