Is Planned Parenthood Chauvinistic and Anti-Choice?

John Rankin (November 12, 2009)

Why would the nation’s largest provider of abortions seek to shut up a former employee, if indeed it is in service to “a woman’s right to choose?”

Abby Johnson, the former director of Planned Parenthood’s abortion center in Bryan, Texas, chose to leave her job, and she chose to speak publicly about it. In her tenure there, her office performed multiple tens of thousands of human abortions. Then once she was asked to help with a live sonogram of a child being aborted, and did so. But too, as she watched the little 13-week old unborn boy resisted the intrusion of the suction tube, then get sucked up as the abortionist sarcastically said, “Beam him up, Scotty,” he soul froze. She realized after the fact that he could have quit her complicity the very moment she saw the little boy’s resistance. Then she left Planned Parenthood and has devoted her life to ending human abortion. Reality broke through, and she made a fully “informed choice” on the matter.

A woman exercised her right to choose. Is this not the battle cry language of the abortion-rights movement?

Yet, Planned Parenthood did not like this particular choice. They filed an injunction to keep Johnson from speaking further about the matter, but the injunction was not given by the court.

Is human abortion something a woman freely chooses, or is it otherwise?

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, research arm of Planned Parenthood, there is a remarkable sociological consistency since the 1970s. About 82 percent of all abortions are performed on unmarried women. The men who got them pregnant are usually not willing to become responsible in marriage and/or fatherhood, and thus the woman’s feels “no choice” but abortion. These men and women also want to keep it a secret, and avoid the public scrutiny. When these men are willing, especially if the woman is a teenager, her own father often steps in and insists on the abortion, and thus, to keep the matter secret. She feels “no choice” but to abort.

For the 18 percent who are married, there is a statistically unreported reality, yet one that is known to those who run crisis pregnancy centers across the nation. They have counseled hundreds of thousands of women from every background and situation. It turns out that three-quarters of these married women are pregnant through an act of adultery. We can easily surmise that the adulterer father does not want the child to be born – his affair would become known. The woman may likewise fear the affair becoming known, but too, she feels “no choice” but abortion unless the man were to promise marriage.

Of the remaining one-quarter of the 18 percent where a woman aborts a child conceived by her husband, it turns out that he is usually in process of leaving the marriage. She feels “no choice” but to abort.

Rarely ever does a healthily married chose to abort their child, and when it does happen, it is usually due to some painful exigencies such as the life of the mother, or health concerns, as told them by their physician.

In essence, human abortion is a quintessential act of male chauvinism. The woman is complicitous in the matter, since she slept with him (apart from the evil of rape and incest). But still, it is the woman gets pregnant, not the man. He has the power to either honor her, or the power to flee. And so many flee, leaving the woman feeling that there is “no choice” but abortion.

Or, to look at it another way, abortion is not “a woman’s right to choose,” but “a male chauvinist’s right to choose” to reify the woman and child – to utterly dehumanize them both. The woman feels she has “no choice,” and the child certainly has no choice.

Planned Parenthood has fought hard against legal attempts to allow the informed choice of abortion-minded women to first see a sonogram. How can this be other than “anti-choice?” Planned Parenthood’s attempted injunction against Abby Johnson sought to keep from the public the reality that they had also pressured her to increase the number of abortions – regardless of the woman’s choice – due to financial motive. This secrecy is consistent with the reality of abortion.

###