In response to Planned Parenthood’s alleged selling of baby body parts, an estimated 12,000 people in 65 cities across the US gathered at “Women Betrayed” rallies on Tuesday, July 28th, demanding that Planned Parenthood be defunded.
Speakers at the Washington, D.C. rally on Capitol Hill included presidential candidates Dr. Ben Carson, senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, news personality Matt Walsh, and several leaders from the pro-life movement, representing the Family Research Council, Americans United for Life, Susan B. Anthony List, Students for Life, Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned Women for America, and Silent No More.
The message presented at these rallies was clear: women have been betrayed, not only by Planned Parenthood, but by our government.
You Get More of What You Subsidize
The government subsidizes education, housing for low-income families, businesses, corn, and sugar. They also subsidize abortions.
Planned Parenthood receives over $500 million a year from the government. To quote Charles Krauthammer: “If you subsidize apples, you get more apples.”
When the government subsidizes Planned Parenthood, it lowers the cost of their services. When costs are lowered, supply rises.
That means when the organization receives half a billion taxpayer dollars a year, they are able to supply more services, like abortions, than they would without the funding.
On top of that, they are incentivized to use all the funding to show they need it, ensuring they will receive that funding again next year. This further incentivizes the organization to sell abortions, and, as the recently released videos show, the remnants of aborted fetuses.
When the government began subsidizing corn, the price of corn dropped. As corn became cheaper, we consumed more of it. In order to make more money from the lower cost of corn, farmers planted more corn. We ended up with tons of cheap corn flooding the market.
As a result, high-fructose corn syrup became a cheaper alternative to sugar, so we started seeing this ingredient in nearly everything – candy, burgers, and sodas. In the end, the effects were costly to the environment and our health.
The government treats the abortion industry in a similar manner. By subsidizing Planned Parenthood, the government treats human life as a commodity like corn. How much more costly is subsidizing a culture of death? How did we even get here?
The Commodification of Human Life
To Planned Parenthood, babies are goods to be harvested and sold. They’re not humans; they’re used car parts.
Allegedly profiting off the trafficking of fetal organs, babies are worth more dead than alive to Planned Parenthood. Perhaps what’s more disturbing is that our own government affirms the dehumanization of unborn babies by slipping money into Planned Parenthood’s pockets.
One of the most disturbing things about the videos released from the Center for Medical Progress is the casual nature of the conversations over the commodification of human life.
This is not a new way of thinking in our culture. Look at America’s history with slavery, the eugenics movement in the early 20th century, and the porn industry today.
Will our grandchildren one day look back in horror that our government supports an organization that commercializes human flesh? Let’s hope so.
Though we fight against the black market of human trafficking, our economy and our government supports a market for baby trafficking.
Immoral Incentives
At the end of the day, Planned Parenthood is a business much like any other. On top of the nearly $500 million they received from the government annually, they rake in $1 billion. They care about their bottom line just line and make their decisions based on profit incentives.
When Planned Parenthood looks at the mother of an unborn child, of the remnants of an aborted child, why wouldn’t they see dollar signs?
As the recent videos suggest, Planned Parenthood even has the incentive to profit off the harvest of baby organs. To increase the quality of their organ sales, this means they also have the incentive to perform later term abortions.
Alison Howard of Alliance for Defending Freedom explains why:
When Planned Parenthood […] said that they wanted lungs […] how many of you here know preemies that were born with underdeveloped lungs? Lungs are one of the last things to develop in a baby. Now you understand why Planned Parenthood has a vested interest in late, late term abortion. They have a vested interest in working against the […] bill that would restrict abortion after 20 weeks, because guys, they wouldn’t be getting the specimens they want.
Abortions are Planned Parenthood’s product, and they have an incentive to sell to their product to women.
In doing so, they often give women misinformation. When Andrea Pearson Mev took the podium at the rally on Capitol Hill, the energetic crowd fell silent as she shared her story of abortion and regret.
She revealed to the crowd that when she walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic as a young pregnant teenager looking for help, she was told her abortion would be the healthy choice. She was promised relief, but found only depression and emptiness.
Women Betrayed by Washington
A morally numbed culture has led to a twisted commodification of unborn babies and immoral business incentives for Planned Parenthood, but not without the government’s legal aid and praise.
Instituted to protect life, our government today is using taxpayer dollars to destroy it. At the Women Betrayed Rally, Walsh called out Washington saying,
It is not only Planned Parenthood who has betrayed us, betrayed women and betrayed children, you have betrayed us Washington. You have betrayed us over and over again. You betray us when you give half a billion dollars a year to a company that already earns over a billion in revenue. And whose primary source of revenue other than tax payer money is the mass slaughter of infant children. You betray us.
I’m convinced that as a woman, Planned Parenthood doesn’t have my best interest in mind. But the more heartbreaking fact is, neither does my own government.
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