The Life Challenges Podcast
The Life Challenges Podcast
A Historical Look at Planned Parenthood and What Christians Should Know
Join us as we explore the multi-layered history of Planned Parenthood, from its humble beginnings to its status as a major player in the abortion debate. We challenge listeners to weigh the moral implications of Planned Parenthood's focus on abortion amidst its broader healthcare claims, encouraging a reevaluation of its narrative. This episode provides a thought-provoking conversation that questions our current culture and explores the potential paths forward.
The Balance of GrayGod, doubt, and proof walk into a podcast... it goes better than you’d expect!
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On today's episode.
Speaker 2:But part of it too is still supply and demand. We can wipe out all the drug cartels, but if John still wants to get his fix, he'll find a way to get a fix. So we've got to work with John. So if Mary still wants to have an abortion, even if we stop Planned Parenthood from performing all abortions, she's still going to get her abortion. In other words, the real evil here has to be administered to in the heart of Mary.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. People today face many opportunities and struggles when it comes to issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. We're here to bring a fresh biblical perspective to these issues and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.
Speaker 1:Hi and welcome back. I'm Krista Potratz and I'm here today with Pastors Bob Fleischman and Jeff Samuels and on today's episode we are going to talk about Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is an organization probably we'll kind of get into it here, but we really wanted to talk about just how it started, the history behind it kind of just as pro-life Christians what we should know about it and just maybe the future of Planned Parenthood too. So, bob, can you get us started here today on just maybe? I mean maybe just generally. I know you had kind of brought up this topic. Why discuss Planned Parenthood? I know you had kind of brought up this topic.
Speaker 2:Why discuss Planned Parenthood? Planned Parenthood has always had a niche in the abortion debate as being the largest private supplier of surgical abortions in America and as a result they've always been on the radar of every pro-life organization and every pro-life politician is always looking to target Planned Parenthood. I have two experiences with Planned Parenthood before I really got to understand what they were all doing. First has to do with when we were pregnant, carrying my oldest daughter, jen, and we were about seven and a half months into the pregnancy and we were taking the birthing classes at the hospital and the last class had a representative of Planned Parenthood come in and I always thought that was a little bit bizarre because we haven't quite delivered the first one yet and we're already talking about how never to let this happen again. And very nice lady. I can't recall anything she taught us, but I mean there was nothing offensive about her, she was nice. That was my first experience and I was aware already at that time that Planned Parenthood had kind of gone to the forefront on abortion issues. All right, so now we jump ahead to 1983-84. I was in my assignment parish out of the seminary in Plymouth, wisconsin, and the Sheboygan County board was going to be allocating mandatory family planning funds and they had targeted those funds to go to Planned Parenthood, which is what probably a majority of the counties were doing because they had to provide these services. And so Planned Parenthood is standing at the front of the line saying we can do that. And I was aware of the fact that up in Brown County they were able to get Planned Parenthood out of the budget at that time because they had a bunch of nurses who were willing to do it. Okay, so I violated one of my upbringing rules that my parents had taught me, and that is can't be a critic unless you're also part of the solution. And I had all of my critic arsenal in hand and I had no solution.
Speaker 2:But I showed up at the county meeting and I tell this those who've heard me speak, I tell the story and it goes like this I showed up and the place was packed and I thought, wow, there's just this undercurrent of activity and zeal to protect unborn children. We're going to get rid of Planned Parenthood and everything. And what I didn't realize is on the agenda Marcus had a drive-in theater and there was a proposal that converted into a dog track. And of course everyone was worried that it was going to torpedo their property values, and so they had so many people in there they couldn't get them all in the room they're out in the hallway and everything. And so they did what any good board would do, and that is well. We'll table this meeting for this matter to another time.
Speaker 2:With that, the entire crowd emptied out and the only two members of the audience left were two ministers. It was me and a Presbyterian minister who sat on the Planned Parenthood board. So, you know, I got up to the microphone. I just said you know, we've got to protect unborn life and all that kind of stuff. And then the Presbyterian guy come and gave all the usual pitches, and then, of course, I was asked well, what do you have in his place? And all I did was I said well, check with Brown County. That was all I could do. And if you know anything about and I didn't know anything about working with boards at that time, but if you know anything about working with municipal boards now, and that is, you better have a solution in mind, because otherwise you're expecting them to do it all. So either way, it was a classic wreck, classic fail. But that was my experience with Planned Parenthood. I've done since then, I've done a lot of research in the Planned Parenthood. There are organizations out there that exist to tell you all the other organizations that support Planned Parenthood, so that you can boycott them and I'm not a fan of boycotts, but there's that facet of it.
Speaker 2:Planned Parenthood has evolved its program from its early beginnings of just focused on birth control for women married women. By the way, they began quite, I think. If Planned Parenthood were to begin today, I think most—it would not even land on the radar of most Christians. Women coming in who were bearing children, who couldn't either care for them or their body couldn't sustain multiple pregnancies, and her own mother died young, and the feeling is that Margaret Sanger blamed too many. She had, I guess in the span of 22 years she had 18 pregnancies and 11 children were born. She had seven miscarriages and Margaret Sanger was a nurse and so from a nurse's perspective, this bothered her deeply.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I would want to point out is that and we make a big mistake on this on both sides of any issue, and that is stake on this, on both sides of any issue, and that is, there is no single issue that ever crops up in a vacuum. There is a multitude of attending issues and perhaps one of the issues that attended this goes back to 1873 and the Comstock Law, which the Comstock Law was a series of regulations that not only prevented using the postal service for mailing pornography and things like that, but it also regulated birth control. And remember also 1916, which is considered to be the start date for Planned Parenthood that in 1916, if we're talking about regulating birth control, we're talking about regulating male birth control. There really wasn't a lot out there. There were no hormone pills. That didn't come out until, you know, the 50s and early 60s. So we're talking about primarily barrier methods and the primary tool was condoms and things like that.
Speaker 2:So it was an interesting uphill battle for what Sanger was trying to do.
Speaker 2:But what helped her is she came in at the cusp of the eugenics movement, which got its beginnings in the 1880s in England with Francis Galton and with the eugenics movement which again started off, you know, I think relatively benign enough it was. Well, we just we first of all don't want too many people, you know we don't want a population explosion, you know we don't want to wear out our resources. That's kind of where it started. And then, and if we have to limit population, we'd rather have the smart ones, the good-looking ones. We don't want the dumb ones and we don't want the ugly ones, and that's kind of—Francis Galton was able to sell that and it came over to the United States. Indiana was the first state to attempt forcible sterilization. You could probably hear more on this if you go on to our eugenics podcast. We reviewed some of it, but it was in that melting pot that Margaret Singer wanted to start some sort of service to help married women understand that there's a way for you to be sexually active with your spouse and not get pregnant.
Speaker 1:How you mentioned, to like even the eugenics movement and just things. Sometimes they start almost innocent enough, like too if we're thinking of like the 1916 or the early 1900s, the poverty of the time and the like, infant deaths or just just that type of thing too, I mean you can think, and maybe not of course, at that time too, not really understanding postpartum depression and that type of thing and so it's like, okay, you know, maybe it's just this innocent type of setting, that's like we really do maybe try to care a little bit about health or women's health. Now I know, like Margaret Sainer, I mean, they're probably beyond, you know, just caring about women. I mean there were probably some topics or just different things in there that were not the best way of thinking about things too, and I think that kind of came out more as the history of Planned Parenthood developed.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean there's. Margaret Sanger gave a presentation at the Women's Auxiliary Meeting of the Ku Klux Klan at one point, I mean, it was pretty clear that she was targeting certain groups, and American blacks were the primary focus of that. But also, you know, immigrants, and this is just American history. A much larger percentage of the immigrants who started coming in after, say, 1900 were coming from Eastern and Southern Europe. Those people whose parents had emigrated or ancestors from northern and western Europe generally thought of the people from southern and eastern Europe as deficient, defective, and so we may not be able to stop them coming in through the borders, but once they're here, we don't want them reproducing quite so much.
Speaker 4:It's funny, you know, some of the same things that people are talking about with immigration debates today. It's this idea of replacement All these people are coming in and they're going to replace us because they're reproducing much faster. And so, yeah, as Bob was saying, margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood came in with that. But you know, with this eugenics, yeah, there is that surface level concern that you say, well, ok, that's you, okay, even if it's not great, it's understandable, it's not so bad. But once you start taking it to its conclusions, okay, what does this mean? We want the best, well, that means we don't want those who aren't the best. Well, how do we get that to happen and how do we push this on them but not on others, and things like that?
Speaker 2:The other thing to keep in mind is that being in favor of eugenics was fashionable back then. Margaret Sanger probably got some of her important initial seed money from John D Rockefeller to third. He was encouraged by his wife to support this kind of upstart family planning type organization and that occurred in 1925. 1924 and 1925, john D Rockefeller gave like $5,000 and then made a second gift to them at the encouragement of his wife. And if you read a lot of the early writings of Sanger horrible, like what Jeff's terminology that you could never use on radio. In fact, if we used it on this podcast and somebody tried to stick it onto YouTube, I'm pretty sure it would get blocked. I mean, she used terms which is why Planned Parenthood today tries to distance themselves from it, which, in fairness, if we can be fair to Planned Parenthood on this one and that is almost all the long-term institutions going back to the turn of the century, going back between the 18 and 1900s, had some sort of involvement with eugenics the big ones, because the big funders of eugenics were all the big millionaires in America. They were very much behind it.
Speaker 2:But there's another side of this too. That kind of comes out, and that is those of you familiar with International Harvester you know International Harvester was the project of Cyrus McCormick and Cyrus McCormick had, I think he had, seven children and child number two and child number seven, mary and Stanley. Both were diagnosed with what today would be called schizophrenic, and Catherine married Stanley, not realizing this problem, and then the conditions started showing up and getting worse and worse and worse and she was concerned not to have schizophrenic children and so she had heard about this Margaret Sanger and very much bankrolled a lot of what she did, and Catherine McCormick is credited with pretty much bankrolling much of the development of the first hormonal birth control, the first hormonal birth control. But you begin to tie money with high-profile people to a movement like Planned Parenthood and you've got a lot of traction and you can get away with saying things that you probably couldn't if you were a much smaller kind of upstart organization.
Speaker 2:And so it's hard to find some of her earliest writings and some of them are extremely offensive and you can't imagine how anyone would want to identify with it. But if you just remember that the statement three generations of imbeciles is enough was not the statement of somebody like Margaret Sanger, it was a statement of a Supreme Court justice. It was the way people talked back then and talked about people with deficiencies, so they constantly saw. The birth control movement, in my view, based on my research, began with a concern for just wives who just were having more children than they can handle.
Speaker 1:And you know, I think too, with Planned Parenthood it started right actually, as the American Birth Control Society, and then they changed the name to Planned Parenthood. I believe Was it sometime in the 40s or something. I guess my question then is when did abortion really start to be part of their model?
Speaker 4:From my reading Bob can correct me if I get something wrong here it really wasn't until Sanger herself was no longer at the head of the organization that the shift started happening.
Speaker 4:In the 1950s they got their first medical director and then in the 60s they got a new director head of the organization, and that basically coincided with the rise in the use of antibiotics and other medical advances, many of which came as a result of World War II.
Speaker 4:And basically what that meant is that where previously women who went for surgical abortions had to go to people you know the cliche is the back alley you know abortionist or whatever, but still these were not doctor's offices, these were not hospitals, these weren't clinics, and so the chances of an infection or some kind of complication were not hospitals, these weren't clinics, and so the chances of an infection or some kind of complication were much greater.
Speaker 4:But then, with all these advances, they were saying, hey, women can now get surgical abortions and we've got all the things that are necessary for them to have a good outcome from that medically speaking. But you know what it has to be? In a doctor's office or in a clinic or a hospital where doctors are in charge, and that was then something that Planned Parenthood got behind and they worked with doctors and medical associations and things like that to do that and that's why they were very much behind some of the pushes that brought abortion to the fore. One of the interesting things about the connections and Planned Parenthood was very much involved with the getting the case Griswold idea of a right to privacy, which isn't in the Bill of.
Speaker 4:Rights, but it was basically something that the Supreme Court in that case said, well, no, this is something that exists, that needs to be protected, and it was on the basis of that right to privacy that the 1973 Roe v Wade case turned and that basically said, well, no, government can't interfere with this because this is a private thing. Although another one of the interesting things is that if you read Roe v Wade, it's all about the right of doctors to perform abortions, that you don't want to get in between a woman and her doctor, whereas today the language is all going to be about a woman's right to make her own choices and such, and the doctor thing is really not a part of it anymore. But yeah, so basically, planned Parenthood saw that the future was with abortion, because they'd largely won the birth control going to push and that they're going to put their efforts behind. And sometime in the 70s, I suppose, is when you'd say that they started making money off of abortion and that changed a lot of the motivations and such.
Speaker 2:In 1955, which Jeff was talking about, mary Calderon was the medical director for Planned Parenthood and she convened a conference of medical professionals to talk about abortion as a reproductive choice. And part of the issue is remember I said at the outset that none of this occurs in a vacuum. You know, abortion had been practiced in various forms by that time, probably for a century. Let me just just to help everybody along, get the book History of Abortion in America and read that and you'll get a whole. You find out. If you just thought abortion showed up in 1973, yeah, you're in for a rude awakening. So a year before I was born they were already talking about abortion in 1955.
Speaker 2:The thing that's interesting is hormonal birth control, where a woman now could actually take active measures. And I don't want to get raw on this, but I often sense when I'd read the literature that if a man decided he wanted to have relations it was, you know he kind of just ran everything we're going to do it now, we're going to have relations and a woman had nothing to protect herself, either from getting pregnant or anything. And you can see why somebody like Margaret Sanger was trying to take care of that with some sort of development of birth control. So the first birth control pill came out on June 23, 1960. And it was a hormonal birth control and it had already been used early on just for women who were having trouble with uncontrolled menstrual cycles, and so they began to find that the added benefit was that I'm not getting pregnant. So of course you have a lot of people saying, well, I'll prescribe this to you for your menstrual cycles, when people were getting prescribed for as a form of birth control. Well, the early hormonal birth control contained some harmful elements that were tied to breast cancer and so forth. So that got modified.
Speaker 2:But it was kind of like Planned Parenthood, both caused and fell into circumstances. They caused the circumstance by focusing the emphasis on a woman's right on birth control or right to procreate, and then they fell into it and forced it too by also funding. But the time was right. We had all of these people coming back World War II, other attending conditions. There were a number of soldiers who returned from World War II who had children while they were fighting overseas, all of this kind of further victimized women, because the fathers of those children deserted them, came back to America and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:And don't anybody get me wrong. I know right now it sounds like I'm a Planned Parenthood sympathizer and I surely am not. But the point is is that before we jump to harsh conclusions, there's more to the history where they dig their own hole. They do it by exploring abortion. It's occurring, it's not always safe. Let's have these medical experts, let's talk about it. One thing leads to the other and they form, or the Guttmacher Institute's formed. It kind of operates out of Planned Parenthood and then it becomes funded by them. Then they ended up breaking it off, but it has a very pro-abortion leaning on their research. So you remember that every time you read the material. But there just is a variety of things that starts opening the door for what Planned Parenthood can get into.
Speaker 2:So when abortion came to the docket it came to the states in the late 1960s. When it came to the Supreme Court in late 71 or into 72, for Planned Parenthood, we were in the right place at the right time and, like Jeff said, you know they latched on to it. They continued to target poor areas because that was where Margaret Sanger's heart originally was. Poor, underserved women. They're the ones who are suffering the most. They don't have the diets for healthy pregnancies. It's harmful to them, harmful to their children. Then that's also why abortion clinics started coming up, because we are dealing with failed birth control. You're dealing with women who are not using birth control, so it was like a natural step for them to go into it.
Speaker 2:And remember that the large umbrella that's overshadowing all of this is the umbrella that we're asking what do I want? No one's asking what does God want or what is right, but the whole climate of the United States had taken some dramatic steps towards the me culture, and so in the me culture we took which arguably some could say, victimized women, and then it became magnified to the point where the victimized women sometimes would make decisions to create another victim, which would be the unborn child who would lose its life in an abortion. But that's where it's like going to the Griswold case. This articulated right to privacy, this articulated right to privacy, this is manifestations of progressivism, where your morality continually evolves and you make progress towards a higher good which has its roots very strongly in evolution. So Planned Parenthood just was, it really was the right organization at the right time to create the right amount of havoc.
Speaker 1:LESLIE KENDRICK. Nowadays with Planned Parenthood, I mean I guess I've heard like Abby Johnson and people that have worked there talk to just about how it's really a money-making machine, especially with abortion, and I know I mean I'd kind of like to talk a little bit too about the government's role in providing money and funding and stuff as well, because it really seems to have erupted really into this big money-making organization. It's very large now.
Speaker 4:Yeah, something a lot of people don't really think about is that just because an organization is technically and legally a non-profit organization doesn't mean that there isn't money-making going on.
Speaker 2:Except at CLR, yeah.
Speaker 4:If you have an income stream part of your non-profit organization, that money goes somewhere and it may end up going to the CEO and to the directors of the clinics and bonuses to the counselors who bring in X number of abortion clients per month or something like that. So there is definitely a profit motive that I'm not going to say it's going to be there for everyone, but it is something that is real and needs to be taken into consideration there.
Speaker 2:I see it a little bit kind of like Goodwill. Goodwill there's a lot of money in Goodwill, you know, and there's a CEO of Goodwill makes a really large salary. I think a lot of us think of it like, just like a charity. I know I gather things up and take it down, drop it off at Goodwill, or if I find a help center nearby or supporting other causes, I go for that. So Jeff's point is valid.
Speaker 2:You can't help if it didn't begin as a profit motive. You can't help but develop a profit motive when you become dependent on it anticipated income either coming in through payments, coming from insurances or from government agencies for providing abortion services or clients providing it. Once you begin to start plugging it into your budget unless you're only using that money to build buildings or capital expenses you begin to rely on it and it becomes a motive. I challenge anybody to tell me oh yeah, it's never a motive. Of course it's a motive.
Speaker 2:Making money isn't what makes it wrong, it's what you're doing makes it wrong. And that's where we start getting into problems with Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood today has got its tentacles in a variety of things and they're extremely well-structured and organized. As an administrative guy, I'm impressed by how they have their program broken down into like three parts and the areas of focus. They have a whole area focused on political developments and stuff like that. That's how it works and that's also how you stay in the business they're in that's also how you stay in the business they're in.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and Bob's example from early in his ministry just illustrates one of the reasons why they are entwined with government in so many ways.
Speaker 4:If they're the only game in town for providing certain services to low-income women or something like that, and the government has money to spend on that, well then it's going to go there.
Speaker 4:But there's also the political cycle. Planned Parenthood is very active politically. They have their goals, whether it's advancing abortion in one sense or fighting attempts to restrict it in the other side. Pay for abortions but pays for something else. Then Planned Parenthood can turn around and use basically the same money even if it came in from one pot, it's still all the same pot to lobby the government to give them more money, and it's something that's really not supposed to happen in a proper democratic system or whatever. But it just means that Planned Parenthood is able to use its vast sums and it's also able to do an awful lot of fundraising to get its preferred policies and its preferred candidates out there, who then, if they get into office that's going to come back to Planned Parenthood and it's also the matter, while Planned Parenthood is not the only game in town. In terms of being and providing abortions, they're the vocal one, they're the visible one and if you work in the government and you're in favor of abortion, you're generally going to be in favor of Planned.
Speaker 2:Parenthood.
Speaker 4:And so that's going to be reflected in terms of contracts being awarded and things like that.
Speaker 1:Planned Parenthood has done a good job, or just a job in general of trying to show that they do a lot of different things. How would somebody kind of combat that a little bit? Or what would they say in response to something like that?
Speaker 4:Well, in the first place, the truth is that since, as we mentioned already, since the 1970s or so, planned Parenthood has been about abortion. That's been their thing, and though they talk a lot about other services that they provide, those are just a drop in the bucket in comparison. Now there was one point they were saying well, abortion, uh, only counts for three percent of of what we do. But when people looked into the numbers that they were using, it's like no, it's actually more like 60 or 70 percent, because they were separating out the one specific thing of surgical abortion from all the things that anesthesia for the surgical abortion and the room for the surgical abortion. They were counting those as separate from abortion costs. But I will say they are branching out a little bit now from abortion and that they're getting into providing drugs for people with gender dysphoria who want to transition to another sex. They're getting on top of that one.
Speaker 4:But the second thing is that even if we were to take their claims about offering so much more than abortion at face value, that still does not remove the moral outrage and evil that is abortion, to claim that one kind of canceled out the other. We should ignore the bad thing because of all the good is. And that would be like arguing that a serial killer should be praised and supported for being a really good worker, a good neighbor and a good friend and that murdering all those people that he wasn't so good to that just doesn't matter because he did so much. That was wasn't so good to that just doesn't matter because he did so much that was good. We wouldn't accept that as a reasonable argument. And why would we accept it? Then about Planned Parenthood, even if they're not only doing abortions?
Speaker 1:So, as Christians, then, what is the takeaway really from doing an episode like this and looking at it? Is Planned Parenthood really the real evil here, or is it something else?
Speaker 2:It's the hearts of people. I mean, it's always been the problem with the hearts of people. When I saw your questions on this episode, what do we do? And I know some members of our own church body who work for Planned Parenthood They'll work in. Do you know? And I know some members of our own church body who work for Planned Parenthood? You know they'll work in clinics and so forth and their argument is you know it's the mission field or something like that.
Speaker 2:I would have a real problem with that because I am so appalled at terminating any human life that I don't know if I can be part of that. But part of affecting change is you got to be able to reach the heart and the way you reach the heart is you've got to establish a relationship. And I know that people could be protesting outside the abortion clinics and I think there's a place for that and I think there's some effectiveness to it. Some lives have been saved and so forth, but it is hard to get to the heart. Lives have been saved and so forth, but it is hard to get to the heart, and I think that there could be as equally strategic as they are. For example, if back in the early 1980s Brown County was able to create a network of nurses who were willing to provide the service. Then it gets Planned Parenthood out of that.
Speaker 2:Now the interesting thing is, you have to remember, pro-life Christians don't want to be in any position where you're dispensing any form of birth control that might have an abortifacient element to it. So already that creates a problem. You know, if we're only dispensing barrier control or natural family planning method or something like that, then pro-life Christians can be part of that, you know. But all of a sudden we get to be a problem if we're going to be dispensing hormonal birth control, which still has a third mechanism it's still listed as a potential abortive patient, that kind of thing. So you're always going to have a problem with that. If you're Roman Catholic, you're going to have a problem with it, period. I mean, if's just birth control and if it's not natural family planning, you're not going to do it.
Speaker 2:So in other words, the law requires that the service be performed on the county level and you have an organization here that lacks the ethical foundation to see the problems of what they're doing. It does create a practical problem, but part of it too is still supply and demand. We can wipe out all the drug cartels. But if John still wants to get his fix, he'll find a way to get a fix. So we got to work with John. So if Mary still wants to have an abortion, even if we stop Planned Parenthood, from performing all abortions, she's still going to get her abortion. In other words, the real evil here has to be ministered to in the heart of Mary, and that's where I think we've got to go. It's the harder approach but it isn't nearly as much fun as the political battles and the protests and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Really, I think there's quite a bit more, too, we could say on this organization and this topic in general, and we'll probably touch it again in the future too. But thank you for all of this information today, and we thank all of our listeners, and if you have any questions on anything we discussed today, please reach out to us at lifechallengesus. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you back next time. Bye.
Speaker 3:Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it and sharing it with friends. We're sure you have questions on today's topic or other life issues. Our goal is to help you through these tough topics and we want you to know we're here to help. You can submit your questions, as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes, at lifechallengesus or email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. In addition to the podcasts, we include other valuable information at lifechallengesus, so be sure to check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit christianliferesourcescom. May God give you wisdom, love, strength and peace in Christ for every life challenge.
