From Dennis Prager today: “The Catholic Church has sided with the big government positions for years. Now they are reaping what they have sown as the Obama Administration tells them what they can do with their hospitals.”
Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times:
It’s true that abortion is only one of the services Planned Parenthood provides. (Although mammograms, it should be noted, are not necessarily among them: the group usually provides referrals, but not the mammogram itself, which is one of the reasons Komen’s founder had cited for discontinuing the grant.) But abortion is hardly an itty-bitty and purely tangential aspect of its mission, as many credulous journalists have implied.
Planned Parenthood likes to claim that abortion accounts for just 3 percent of its services, for instance, and this statistic has been endlessly recycled in the press. But the percentage of the group’s clients who received an abortion is probably closer to 1 in 10, and Planned Parenthood’s critics have estimated, plausibly, that between 30 and 40 percent of its health center revenue is from abortion.
By way of comparison, the organization also refers pregnant women for adoption. In 2010, this happened 841 times, against 329,445 abortions.
On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “In the hearts of most people who are active on pro-choice, they know that there is at least a smidgen to the conservative position that that unborn is not just tissue. This is why they are so defensive. The moment they would acknowledge that there is a moral problem with taking the life of a human fetus for no reason other than personal convenience, which 99% of abortions are, ex-post facto birth control… That’s why they fight so strenuously to prevent women considering an abortion from seeing pictures of their [live] fetus.”
“At least 50% of women are pro-life. To the extent that it is a gender issue, men want women to get abortions because that enables men to impregnate women without responsibility.”
