Planned Parenthood: What Every Christian Should Know

                                                                                                                                                                              Vol. III, No. 3, April 1990

(The following is reprinted from the American Family Association Journal, April 1989, and was written by J. Kirk Shrewsbury, Executive Director, Southern Baptists for Life.)

Planned Parenthood (PP) is an international movement dedicated to population control through birth control and abortion. Domestically, it is known as Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). Its 187 local "affiliates" operate nearly a thousand clinics which make abortion referrals and distribute birth control pills and devices to minors without parental notification or consent. They operate over 60 abortuaries that report nearly 100,000 abortions annually, making PP the largest single provider of abortions in the U.S.

PPFA and its affiliates get over a third of their funding through federal, state, and local tax money, typically $111 million in a year. Much of this comes through Title X ("Title Ten"), our federal government's annual $140 million birth control giveaway. Some have called it “the federal subsidy for fornication," because this program requires no form of parental consent for unmarried minors who want free pills.

Planned Parenthood is very active in governmental lobbying, and is considered our nation's foremost promoter of legalized abortion and of federal funding for elective abortion. Its deceptive motto, "Every child a wanted child," has been used successfully for years to promote legalized abortion on demand.

The research arm of PP is the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), named after a former president of PPFA who advocated that doctors should regard unwanted pregnancy as a venereal disease. AGI conducts supposedly scientific studies with U.S. governmental grants which routinely conclude that American teenagers should have more public school sex education and freer access to birth control. Short summaries of these studies and their very predictable conclusions are carried widely in the nation's newspapers.

The overseas wing of PP, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), is active in 120 nations and is widely regarded as the world's foremost abortion promoter. IPPF advocates a global plan for redistribution of wealth, income, and resources, and is openly socialist in its political orientation. It maintains an outspoken policy of violating the law in third-world countries where abortion is still illegal.

IPPF received 25% of its funding from U.S. AID until former President Reagan's "Mexico City Policy" cut off foreign aid funds to organizations which perform, promote, or counsel for abortion. The Reagan administration also issued new Title X regulations in a similar attempt to cut off some government funding of abortion promoters at home, such as PPFA and its affiliates, but this has not yet succeeded due to court battles.

Planned Parenthood was founded in 1921 as the American Birth Control League by Margaret Sanger, a noted racist, eugenicist, and free sex advocate. Her main goals were (1) to cause a revolution in sexual values by promoting the use of birth control devices to disconnect sexuality from reproduction, and (2) to promote white world-supremacy by means of eugenics (sterilization of supposed defectives and inferiors).

She advocated sterilization of blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Referring to the poor as "human weeds," she advised withholding all medical treatment from them. She was very sympathetic to the growth of Nazism in Germany, frequently publishing Nazi eugenics articles in her Birth Control Review. The slogan on the magazine's masthead was "Creating a Race of Thoroughbreds." Some of her close associates helped draft Hitler's eugenics laws. In 1942, Sanger renamed the organization "Planned Parenthood" to disassociate herself from the failed Nazi master race concept. PP has in recent years attempted unsuccessfully to sanitize the history of its founder Margaret Sanger, who undoubtedly remains one of the most influential persons in the history of American social engineering.

In the last two decades, PP has taken a leading role in public school sex education. They produce sexually explicit booklets and films aimed at school children, encouraging them to make their own decisions about becoming "sexually active," and sometimes endorsing incestuous relationships and homosexuality as valid sexual options. PP is a major leader in the effort to popularize federally funded school based "health" clinics which distribute birth control [devices] and make abortion referrals directly on the high school campus under the guise of "comprehensive" student health care.

A candid study of Planned Parenthood's history, present goals, and activities leads to the inevitable conclusion that PP is radically opposed to traditional Judeo-Christian morals and family values. Planned Parenthood's wealth, its access to government funds, and its ubiquitous presence across the United States make it one of the most potent forces of destructive social change in our society.