On the Closing of Wyoming’s only Planned Parenthood Clinic

Our Common Belief

Your life is the deliberate choice of an almighty and good Creator. That is not only my belief, it is probably yours as well. Even if you don’t think about it much, you make this assumption. Because apart from this basic starting point, there is little purpose in life, and even less hope and love.

Once you believe that God deliberately created you, you also know that your existence is not due to random chance, and certainly not bad luck. You were planned. God Himself wants you to exist. And the same goes for everyone you meet.

If your life matters to God, it also matters to me. This truth binds us together into a community that cares for each other. Get rid of a common creator, and you are left without any logical reason to care for anyone but yourself. On the other hand, if we are all children of the same creator, every human life, from the greatest to the least, deserves the protection of everyone else.

And there’s more.

An integral part of God’s plan for you, was for you to grow in the womb of your mother. Instead of an egg in the nest, or a tadpole in the pond, human babies gestate in the womb of female human being.

What a special person she is! Mother’s Day is a day for flowers, and thankfulness, and love. Only half of the human race is capable of motherhood, and not all women become mothers. Still, every single one of us has a mother.

Like you, she is vulnerable and flawed. But she is also infinitely precious to the same One who created you. You and she both are divinely planned. Both mother and child are God’s gift to the world. They are planned by God, even if they weren’t planned by their parents. People have accidents, but God never does.

Because God cared enough to plan both, we should care enough to take care of both. That is our special privilege as a caring community of neighbors. And, if God has planned both, then God Himself certainly gives a way to love every pregnant woman, while also loving her child.

These two loves are in deep harmony and not in conflict. Our job is to find that harmony. Dr. David Reardon, Director of the Elliot Institute, articulates it well, “only the mother can nurture her unborn child. All that the rest of us can do is to nurture and protect the mother.” That is true care.

The Competing Belief

Sadly, some believe otherwise. Those who assume that their life is an unplanned accident, tend to think that everybody else is a potential problem. They are “mouths to feed,” “drains on my time and energy,” and “competition for limited resources.”

That’s the worldview of Planned Parenthood. As a result, they act as though women are best cared for by pitting them against their children.

Planned Parenthood preaches this theology with the help of 500 million federal dollars every year. Through your taxes, their preaching is amplified more than any church. Not only do they use your money to lobby for more money, and to campaign for those who give it to them, they also use it to convince more than 320,000 American women to abort their children every year.

And they make millions of dollars on these abortions.

When a woman finds out that she is pregnant, she is filled with powerful emotions, some delightful and some scary. Often it is a mixture of both. If the woman is nurtured and cared for, the joy will usually win out over the fear.

Surveys of post-abortion regret vary widely, depending on the length of time after the abortion, which indicators are measured, and the bias of the researchers. Even the most conservative estimates find that 30% of women report regret their abortion, some as high as 90%. On the other hand, at least one survey of women who have decided to carry the child to term find zero regret. (Reardon, Makimaa, Sobie, Victims and Victors)

A 1989 L.A. Times poll found that 74% of post-abortive women believed that abortion was morally wrong, but had one anyway. Why? Because they are overwhelmed by pressure from others. Authority figures like parents, partners, or Planned Parenthood counselors made them feel hopeless and forced into abortion against their wishes.

Even Planned Parenthood’s former research arm, the Guttmacher institute, reports that 89% of post-abortive women would have liked to keep the baby. Nobody should be forced to violate their own deepest convictions. We should all find ways to address their needs and counter the forces which make women feel powerless.

Pregnant women seeking support should be shown the full array of services that we have created to serve them – from WIC to food stamps, from childcare subsidies to church support groups. Responsible counselors should give them information on every federal, state, and local program that can offer help in carrying and raising their children.

Medical information should also be given them. They need to know the risks of infection and the risk of sterility. They need to know the facts about breast cancer and abortion. They need to know the longitudinal studies about PTSD, substance abuse, and an increased suicide risk. They need to be provided an opportunity to see by ultrasound, what they are being pressured to abort -- an opportunity Wyoming now gives them by law.

Planned Parenthood lobbies against every one of these proposals. Meanwhile the Guttmacher Institute spins the research that contradicts its narrative, doing little real research of its own. After more than 44 years of legalized abortion, large-scale, random-sample studies of these risks have still not been done.

Worse still, there is not even one, single study proving either medical or mental health benefits from abortion. Planned Parenthood’s entire business model is based on unproven assumptions. That is a crime.

A Better Way

Thankfully, America has around 2,200 pregnancy resource centers, including ten in Wyoming, that operate according to the belief that both lives are precious. This is far more than the 665 clinics run by Planned Parenthood.

They are funded by the donations of people who care about women and children. They are not in the business of making money, so they won’t be leaving Wyoming when their clientele drops below 500. They are not run by CEOs making an average of over $186,000 annually. Nor do they have a corporate overlord like Cecile Richards, who makes more than a half a million every year.
They serve thousands of Wyoming women every year -- all without the help of government funding.

Planned Parenthood pretends to have a monopoly on caring for women, and your tax dollars are lavished upon them accordingly. It is high time for the federal government to break this monopoly. Congress needs to look carefully at every organization which cares for women and rethink their funding.

No one should be forced either to fund, or support a business actively opposed to their fundamental beliefs. Any organization that cannot acknowledge the humanity of half the people who enter its doors, should not be called a humanitarian organization.

Beyond that, Congress should consider the benefit to women for each dollar spent. The percentage of money that goes to rich CEOs should be another consideration. And no organization receiving federal money should be allowed to campaign for the very politicians who give them money.

By any of these measures, the US House of Representatives was right to pass an amendment which would free 390 million dollars from the Planned Parenthood monopoly and give local agencies the opportunity to compete for these funds on a merit basis. Whatever else happens to the AHCA in the Senate, we should encourage our senators to enact this reform.

Caring for the women and children who find themselves in difficult times is the business of all of us. As children of the same God, we are all in this together. That is the basis of our common humanity, our common government, and our Wyoming neighborliness.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-rocky-mountains/patient-resources/wyoming-abortion-fund

https://www.care-net.org/abundant-life-blog/informed-consent-or-slick-marketing