Charlie Baker, The Abortion Governor

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2017/03/06/charlie-baker-the-abortion-governor/

                        Mirror, Mirror, on the wall

                        Who’s the most pro-abortion of them all?

 

Among governors in the United States, it might be our own Charlie Baker.

Last week, Baker (R-Planned Parenthood) announced that if Congress de-funds the nation’s largest abortion provider, he’ll make sure that Massachusetts state government makes up the difference.

Now let’s not pretend that this decision has nothing to do with abortion or that it has anything to do with “women’s health,” as a spokesman for the governor claimed Friday.

Yes, federal tax dollars can’t go directly to pay for most abortions, thanks to the Hyde Amendment. Yes, Planned Parenthood receives reimbursements from Medicaid for non-abortion services. Therefore, the new state money Baker has in mind would reimburse Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services.

But abortion is a huge part of Planned Parenthood’s business model. Planned Parenthood benefits from the reluctance of most health care providers to get involved in abortion. Planned Parenthood has no such reluctance, which helps make it the largest abortion provider in the United States.

And since money is fungible, the funds that Planned Parenthood gets from the federal government for non-abortion-related services indirectly benefit its lucrative abortion practice, because the money it gets from other sources can be used for abortion.

Moreover, there’s nothing else that Planned Parenthood provides that isn’t widely available elsewhere. Cancer screenings, pregnancy tests, contraception? Providers abound, including ones that accept Medicaid. Sex education? Please.

The reason when you hear “Planned Parenthood” you think “abortion” is that there isn’t anything else that distinguishes Planned Parenthood.

How important is abortion to Planned Parenthood from a business perspective? Planned Parenthood won’t give the numbers — its president and chief executive officer, Cecile Richards, dodged the question when she testified before Congress in September 2015. But it’s clearly a major part of the organization’s business model.

Planned Parenthood’s budget during the 2014-2015 fiscal year was a little less than $1.3 billion, according to its annual report. That year the organization performed 323,999 abortions.

Even that staggering number understates the importance of abortion to Planned Parenthood. How many customers — it’s hard to call them “patients” — wouldn’t go to Planned Parenthood for its other services if Planned Parenthood didn’t also offer abortions? Take abortion away, and the multiplier effect it has on Planned Parenthood’s revenue also goes away.

And recent trends must be worrisome to Planned Parenthood. The number of abortions in this country is going down. You can almost see why Planned Parenthood officials were hocking fetal body parts.  They need to increase the profit margin.

About 43 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget in 2014-2015 came from government. (That includes state government, but much of it was from the federal government.) How much money would Planned Parenthood stop receiving from other sources if its budget were immediately cut dramatically? Would Planned Parenthood start to look like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy throws water on her?

Consider those factors, and now the shrillness of the rhetoric of Planned Parenthood officials and their enablers starts to make sense. When it comes to federal de-funding, Planned Parenthood is fighting hard because it’s fighting for its life. (How ironic.)

To those of you who still think there’s something good about Planned Parenthood, consider its history and its present.

Planned Parenthood began as a way to limit the number of genetically “unfit” people and encourage “racial betterment” in the world. (Here’s the founder, Margaret Sanger, on that subject.)

Now it’s an equal opportunity search-and-destroy unit. (Yet the effects are disproportionate; a study of 36 states by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that almost 40 percent of the abortions performed in those states in 2013 were on black women. That’s about 3 ½ times the rate of white women for the same states that year.)

The name of the organization is itself misleading. Planned Parenthood isn’t about planning parenthood. It’s about avoiding parenthood. Through its values-free approach to sex education and contraception, the organization encourages the lowest common denominator of human sexual behavior. Then, if pregnancy occurs and it’s deemed unwanted, the organization terminates the life within.

In other words, first Planned Parenthood degrades human beings. Then it kills them.

That’s what Charlie Baker is supporting — with our money.