Happy Birthday, Planned Parenthood

"It's hard to imagine where we'd be in this country had Margaret Sanger not founded that first clinic here in New York, 90 years ago. Luckily, we don't have to. Happy birthday, Planned Parenthood!" — Dana Delany

Truer words were never spoken.

It is unclear how we managed to miss this landmark. It was on October 16, 1916, that Margaret Sanger, the sainted founder of Planned Parenthood, opened her first "birth control" clinic in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn. Ms. Sanger, of course, harbored some rather odd social and political views. A confirmed racist and enthusiastic eugenicist, her ideas were indistinguishable from those of the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler. Ah yes, the dream of racial hygiene.

Sanger (a committed Socialist), entertained as part of her utopian dream a world free of abortion. In her 1920 book Woman and the New Race, in a chapter titled "The Goal," she wrote:

There will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion, nor through neglect in foundling homes, nor will there be infanticide.

If only. Contrary to her dream, The Planned Parenthood Federation has instead achieved its own utopian goal of making abortion safe: Safe from voters, safe for Planned Parenthood's contributors, safe for abortionists plying a profitable if grisly trade, safe for those unwilling to be inconvenienced, safe for those with bad timing, safe for those with other plans. It remains, of course, terminally unsafe for the children.

What Planned Parenthood is all about is no secret. One need only review their most recent annual report, available online HERE.

In 2004, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates conducted 255,015 "abortion procedures." This was a 4% increase over 2003. Given that there were slightly more than 4 million live births in the United States in 2004, that means that Planned Parenthood -- all by itself -- killed about 6% of the children who would otherwise have been born in the United States in 2004.

Of course, that’s not the whole picture: According to Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute, one quarter of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. We kill one in four of our children before they have the chance to even be born.

But is this what the organization is about? Well, one might compare that figure with another from the annual report. Planned Parenthood, during 2004, "referred out" 1,414 adoptions. That was a decline from 2003, when the figure was a whopping 1,774. You see, the organization with "parenthood" in its name does not itself do adoptions. It does abortions. And, it tells us, it does more than 180 abortions for every adoption it "refers out."

What does it mean that Planned Parenthood found adoption to be an option for less than one percent of the children it aborted in 2004?

Happy Birthday, Planned Parenthood.