Dawn Laguens is the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and she is quite clear when it comes to one thing: She would do most anything to ensure that the so-called right to abortion remains intact.
In an opinion piece for Glamour, Laguens opines on the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, now that President Donald Trump has nominated federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She insists that this right to abortion is deeply personal not just to all women, but to her.
“In 1983, as a freshman at [Louisiana State University], I became pregnant. I didn’t want to be. Like so many people who find themselves in the same predicament, I was near broke and only beginning to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. But I knew, without a doubt, that I was not ready to be a mother. I borrowed money and had an abortion at the health center in town,” she writes.
Laguens goes on to say that if abortion had been illegal in Louisiana, she would have gone out of her way to get the procedure in another state.
Throughout the article, Laguens celebrates the freedom that that her abortion gave her. Today, she is the mother to triplet girls, and she “thinks of them” when she fights to keep Roe v. Wade intact through her work at Planned Parenthood.
Even though Laguens states time and time again that Roe v. Wade is a constitutional right, the law itself is severely flawed in its writing. Many legal scholars who are pro-abortion have said there is no constitutional basis in the right to abortion.
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Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor, once said, “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”
Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion business in America, aborting approximately 320,000 unborn babies every year. Its most recent annual report showed a record income of $1.46 billion, with about half a billion dollars coming from taxpayers. At the federal level, President Donald Trump and his administration also have been cutting off various streams of funding to abortion groups.
However, Laguens says she thinks of the “1 in 5 women who come to Planned Parenthood, and how we have changed their lives by helping them to own their own bodies through access to birth control, education, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and abortion.”
It’s a widely-quoted statistic that abortions only account for 3 percent of the services that Planned Parenthood performs. However, research shows that is not the case. The Radiance Foundation found in Planned Parenthood’s 2014 annual report that they performed nearly 32.8 percent of all abortions in the United States in 2013.
Laguens, and those who work alongside her at Planned Parenthood, may believe that their fight to protect abortion may be a valiant effort. However, celebrating the merciless killings and brutality of abortion is anything but valiant.
Laguens may think she is doing her daughters a service by advocating for abortion, but as she does that she denies countless other children – and possibly her own grandchildren — their inherent right to life.
