“Sally (not her real name) was a church-going Christian. She was also unmarried but had reason to think she was pregnant. While she was over 18, she rightly turned to her parents for help and advice. Her parents, also Christians and solid church members, wanting to help her, took her not to one of Wisconsin’s life-saving, women-helping Pregnancy Resource Centers but to a local Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
That decision baffled me. I asked some folks why they had done that. The response was telling. “Well,” they said, “it’s the only place they knew that gave free pregnancy testing.” My heart sank. That told me that Planned Parenthood has been successful—hugely so—in their marketing. Even Christian kids from Christian families and who had been in Christian schools knew about Planned Parenthood and saw it as the first line of help with a suspected or known pregnancy. I was pretty sure, too, that these folks thought of Planned Parenthood as “safe,” probably in all ways, meaning having their best interest at heart, giving reliable information, and not reporting them to any officials or even to parents.
Talk about eye-opening. I realized that even my own people did not know the truth about Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. They didn’t know about Pregnancy Resource Centers that are a much, much better place to go for help in these situations. And so we have determined that Wisconsin Family Council will use every available means to educate people about Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and Wisconsin’s fabulous Pregnancy Resource Centers.
For starters, lawsuits are underway in Arizona, Colorado and Ohio Planned Parenthood operations for not reporting underage rape. We’ve already had accusations of this sort about at least one Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin facility. The law generally requires health-care providers, which is what Planned Parenthood keeps saying they are, to report sexual abuse of minors. Undercover work shows it’s not all that unusual for Planned Parenthood personnel to absolutely ignore the information they are given about the ages of the girl and the man in given situations. That’s not just illegal; it’s downright dangerous for the young girl.
We know young women going to Planned Parenthood will not be told the truth about the baby they are carrying. They’ll be told it is just a fetus, a clump of tissues, a mass of cells, the product of conception. To call this a baby would be complicit in humanizing the pregnancy—and we certainly wouldn’t want that.
And this leads to the reality that Planned Parenthood is the nation’s and our state’s largest abortion provider. We learned recently that it’s standard policy for Planned Parenthood to actually budget for a certain number of abortions, which then gets viewed as “must-make” quotas. That means that when a young girl comes to Planned Parenthood and finds out or confirms she’s pregnant, we can boldly say she is going to be advised to abort the baby. We know, too, from reports Planned Parenthood has filed, that they are very unlikely to refer for adoption. Of course, they don’t make any money off adoptions.
All of this is if the girl goes to a Planned Parenthood facility. But many young people are first introduced to Planned Parenthood in their schools when they come in to do instruction as part of the school’s sex ed program. In these situations they are taught that casual, recreational sexual activity outside marriage is just fine—doesn’t hurt anybody—just be safe or safer. They promote contraceptive drugs and devices in pretty graphic ways. Students are referred to we
bsites that also promote promiscuity—dangerous behaviors that come with all kinds of problems, sometimes for a lifetime. To make all this worse, much of the nasty work Planned Parenthood does is done using taxpayer money.
Simply put, Planned Parenthood is not a safe place for young women. It is not the place Christians should think of first or go to for help with a possible or real unplanned or crisis pregnancy. Sally did the right thing to talk to her parents. But her parents should have first checked with a pastor for help if they weren’t sure where to go next. Pastors need to be referring the Sallys they encounter to a reliable near-by Pregnancy Resource Center. Sadly, I’ve heard about well-intentioned pastors actually referring people to Planned Parenthood. So part of our education has to be to make sure pastors know about Wisconsin’s Pregnancy Resource Centers.
As it turned out, Sally wasn’t pregnant, though she could have been. Nevertheless, it’s a sad commentary that so many professing Christian young people today are needing referrals to places dealing with unplanned pregnancies. But that is the tragic reality. Let’s at least know the truth about Planned Parenthood and not put our young women in the hands of those who will just make a bad situation much worse.”
LifeNews Note: Julaine Appling is the president of Wisconsin Family Action.
