On September 18, 2015, The House of Representatives voted for legislation that would temporarily de-fund Planned Parenthood while an investigation continues into it’s sale of aborted babies and their body parts. The investigation was prompted by the emergence of a series of videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale and use of human organs and body tissue. I have no interest in delving into that sordid subject, but rather to explore the question “Why do we fund Planned Parenthood at all?”

Planned Parenthood Federation of America is a non-profit organization with revenue of $1,303,400,000.00 in 2014. Around $528,000,000.00 of that money comes from the government, so you can see that defunding may prove to be devastating to the finances of this organization. The Planned Parenthood motto is “Care. No Matter What.” Pretty noble, but to what end?

Planned Parenthood is a name adopted for the organization American Birth Control League, founded in 1921 by Margaret Higgins Sanger. Hillary Clinton said of Sanger: “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision, I am really in awe of her, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life.” I agree with Ms. Clinton in one respect. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from Ms. Sanger’s life, and from her words.

In the “Birth Control Review” from April, 1932, Ms. Sanger wrote: “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.” Her “Plan for Peace” from the same publication included an outline for the “American Baby Code” she hoped to persuade the Federal government to implement and enforce, which included such tenets as, “Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies… and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.
Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit…
Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.” A firm believer in Eugenics, she sought to eliminate “dysgenic” people and bloodlines from society, so only those with so called “good genes” would be allowed to live and procreate. In “America Needs a Code for Babies” she wrote: “Give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.” Now, it should also be noted that Ms. Sanger did not like the practice of abortion, personally.

Sanger was received well by groups like the Ku Klux Klan when she spoke to them, little wonder when you consider she wrote in 1922, in Woman, Morality and Birth Control: “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” She was funded in her efforts by such notables as John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself. In fact, John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated five thousand dollars to her American Birth Control League in 1924 and a second time in 1925.
Now, it would be misleading to imply that these are still the goals of Planned Parenthood, but it is important to know the foundation of the organization. Why do some people want to control population growth when even the United Nations predicts that population expansion will plateau worldwide later in this century after reaching a peak of 8.3 billion people? It really beats me. The world population is 7,324,782,000 people right now. All of the people in the world could fit within the borders of Jacksonville Florida. Jacksonville, Florida has 834 square miles of land which equals 23,250,585,600 square feet (834 x 27,878,400*) - *One square mile equals 27,878,400 square feet
Each person occupies a square 1-1/2’ x 1-1/2’ which equals 2.25 square feet
7,324,782,000x 2.25 square feet per person equals 16,480,759,000 square feet needed, with almost 242 square miles to spare.

As a non-profit, Planned Parenthood is exempt from most taxes, so taxpayers are already subsidizing them that way, in the same manner that we subsidize churches and service organizations, so why should we subsidize them with an additional $528 million a year?

Do tell.