Wisconsin Newspaper Funds New Planned Parenthood Abortion Center
by Paul Nowak
LifeNews.com Staff Writer
May 27, 2004
Madison, WI (LifeNews.com) — A Madison newspaper has made a large financial donation to Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin to help build a new facility that will not only perform abortions, but will also train new abortion practitioners.
The Evjue Foundation, the charitable arm of the Madison Capital Times newspaper, reported a donation of $25,000 to "help support building the organization’s new Comprehensive Reproductive Health Center in Madison."
The new facility opened in January, and is located near the Truax campus of Madison Area Technical College.
In addition to family planning and testing for sexually transmitted diseases, the 6,500 square-foot facility will also provide on-site medical and surgical abortions, as well as a residency training program. It is the only facility to offer medical and surgical abortions in south central Wisconsin.
Both the Foundation and the Times did not respond to inquiries from LifeNews.com about the gift.
Susan Armacost, Legislative and PAC Director for Wisconsin Right to Life told LifeNews.com, said her group was "appalled, but not surprised" at the donation.
"Given the particular bent of the paper this is something they would do," Armacost explained.
Armacost said the Madison newspaper is almost always biased on abortion-related stories. "On occasion a story is fair," Armacost said. "But there is always a bias."
According to Barbara Lyons, president of Wisconsin Right to Life, Planned Parenthood’s decision to open the Madison abortion business followed the "notorious" abortion practitioner Dennis Christensen’s loss of his lease to operate out of Meriter Hospital in Madison.
Christensen, who operates the new facility for Planned Parenthood, has been an abortion practitioner for years in Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The Capital Times did have other similar organizations in Dane County they could have supported without aiding Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.
Liz Osborn, Executive Director of Care Net Pregnancy Center of Dane County, told LifeNews.com her organization has already planned to build a 10-bedroom maternity home just down the road from Planned Parenthood’s newest facility. Care and services will be provided 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without charge.
Madison residents are not the only ones subject to an openly pro-abortion newspaper in their town.
The Houston Chronicle in Texas has also tossed their journalistic objectivity aside, having donated between $1,000 – $4,999 on at least two occasions to their local Planned Parenthood affiliate.
During a keynote address to a luncheon for Friends of Planned Parenthood, an editorial board member of the Chronicle said that if the paper was not so openly supportive of Roe v. Wade or the "right" to an abortion, she would not have taken the editorial position with the paper.
The Brazos Valley Coalition for Life has included the Houston Chronicle in a list of area organizations that resolutely support the state’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood of Houston and Central Texas.
Meanwhile, a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center has found that journalists at national media outlets consider themselves more liberal and less conservative than nine years ago. Of those surveyed, 34 percent describe themselves as liberal, up from the 22 percent that called themselves liberal in 1995. Only 7 percent called themselves conservative in 2004, up from an even smaller 4 percent in 1995.
While not monolithic, most liberals tend to back abortion while most conservatives normally take a pro-life position.
According to the Capital Times and the Evjue Foundation’s website, the Foundation is a result of the will of William Evjue, the paper’s founder, who expressed a wish that the paper’s success be shared with "organizations that best exemplify the beliefs that he championed during his lifetime, causes that could improve the quality of life for all the people in the Dane County area." The Foundation has awarded of $24 million in grants since its founding in 1970.
Related web sites:
Wisconsin Right to Life – https://www.wrtl.org
