Guest Post: Help Defund Planned Parenthood By Doing This

How did Planned Parenthood become a billion-dollar-a-year non-profit?

Why did U.S. taxpayers provide $528 million in grants and reimbursements to the organization in 2014 alone?

The answer is partly because Planned Parenthood is very good at marketing its products.

For instance, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards recently posted a meme to her Facebook page touting the services the group provides. The meme enumerated the number of pap tests, breast exams and STI tests conducted by the organization.

That’s the face of Planned Parenthood they want you to see.

However, there’s another side: one key number Richards didn’t include was 327,653. That’s the number of abortions Planned Parenthood committed in 2014. Her meme doesn’t tout the fact that Planned Parenthood is the number one abortion seller in the country. That’s not a winning marketing talking point.

But the recent undercover videos being released are pulling back the veil of “antiseptic tidiness” that has covered Planned Parenthood, and the abortion industry at large, for too long.

Thanks to these videos, Planned Parenthood will no longer be able to hide behind phrases like “pregnancy tissue,” because we’ve heard the group’s top doctor talk about harvesting intact hearts and livers from aborted babies.

The abortion giant’s tag line of “Care: No Matter What” rings hollow when staff in these videos suggest they change (or are willing to change) the abortion method in a way to better obtain organs and tissues – even when that means violating its pledge to women not to change the manner of “care” when a woman agrees to donate tissue.

And as the third (graphic) video, shows, abortion isn’t just about a woman’s body or a woman’s rights. A baby is very clearly involved – and that child’s little hands and feet are pushed aside in the search for organs. (A fourth video was released today; you can watch them all here.)

Women and their preborn babies deserve better than abortion.

I should know: I had an abortion in 1981. It’s a decision I will always regret. It’s a decision I made when I felt trapped in an unplanned pregnancy and believed the lie that abortion is a choice like any other choice. “Choice,” it turns out, is one of those marketing buzz words that sells abortion to women while failing to consider the fragile life growing inside of her.

And so, after watching these videos, we as a country now have our own choice to make.

Will we continue to provide more than a half billion dollars of federal funds a year to Planned Parenthood – representing more than 40 percent of the group’s budget? Or will we defund the abortion giant?

What you can do to help

The U.S. Senate is poised to vote on a measure next week – S. 1881, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act – that would prohibit funding to Planned Parenthood Federation of American and all its affiliates. It will ensure overall federal funding of women’s health services will not be reduced; rather, it redirects Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding to other eligible entities that provide women’s non-abortion health care services.

This is your chance to speak up.

Please go to our action page to find your two U.S. Senators and more information on the bill, then make your voice heard.

To learn more about Planned Parenthood and why it should be defunded, see our fact sheet, “A Case to Defund Planned Parenthood.”

The time to act is now.

Carrie Gordon Earll is the vice president of government and public policy at Focus on the Family, where she leads the staff that provides expertise on a range of social policy topics affecting life issues, marriage, sexuality and religious freedom. She also serves as the senior policy analyst for bioethics, researching and writing on a range of topics including abortion, end-of-life medical decisions and physician-assisted suicide.