Building a culture of life requires looking beyond Planned Parenthood, participants in a panel discussion on Thursday at The Heritage Foundation concurred.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, is facing allegations that it is trafficking the body parts of aborted babies following the release of hours of undercover footage by the Center for Medical Progress. The most recent video was released Tuesday.
The videos have spurred a renewed interest in alternatives to Planned Parenthood.
Sarah Torre, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, said the allegations “leave us with serious policy questions.”
“Is this an organization that deserves over half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding?” Torre asked. “Is an organization constantly embroiled in controversy the best we can do for women’s health? Or are there better ways to provide care that women, men and children need?”
“The videos have shown us where the logic of abortion on demand inevitably leads,” Torre said. “It leads to where tiny livers and lungs and hearts are useful for harvesting, but the nameless baby that they come from is of no value at all.”
Torre said a network of federally qualified community health centers vastly outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics, and are equipped to serve the needs of women.
Planned Parenthood has denied making a profit from illegal transactions involving aborted babies’ body parts, and recently announced that it will no longer accept “reimbursement” for donations of body parts to researchers.
Mollie Hemingway, senior editor of The Federalist, who has extensively documented the scandal, gave an overview of the contents of each of the 11 short videos that have been released.
“To sum up: Planned Parenthood engages in human organ harvesting,” Hemingway said. “They clearly sell human organs, the discussion goes well beyond cost recuperation, they’re terrified of media scrutiny of their human organ harvesting trade, and they’re terrified of congressional interest in human organ harvesting from aborted children.”
Hemingway called major media outlets’ handling of the controversy “an abomination,” and their failure to investigate the allegations “a scandal.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, said that “Planned Parenthood has become so entrenched in our politics and in our culture, but there are so many different alternatives that we can support, that take a different approach to human life, women’s dignity and family.”
Dr. Grazie Christie, a radiologist and an advisory board member of The Catholic Association, said, “Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with health care.”
“What Planned Parenthood does is promote a new definition of health care, and they’ve done this very successfully. They’ve narrowed health care to mean something very small.”
Christie said Planned Parenthood doesn’t regard women as “human beings,” but as “cash cows.”
Planned Parenthood only offers a small “menu of women’s health care,” and its reduction of health care is “scary.”
“What is a good life and how do we live it?” Christie said. “Planned Parenthood has a very small notion of that. Health care is the prevention of disease and the promulgation of life and the treatment of disease.”
“Pregnancy is not a disease,” she added.
Sister Magdalene Teresa, S.V., the director of the Visitation Mission for the Sisters of Life, an order of Catholic nuns who serve pregnant and vulnerable women and their children, said when a woman is given a real choice, she will choose life.
“When you choose new life, it brings you new life,” Sister Magdalene said. “We often ask, if everything were different, if you had an apartment, a job, and people you could share this joy with, what would you do? The frightened, pregnant woman always responds, ‘then I would choose life for my baby.’”
Sister Magdalene said that offering women support during crisis pregnancies promotes a culture of life.
“The lie of abortion is that everything will go back to the way it was before you were pregnant.”
“Women deserve better than abortion,” Sister Magdalene said. “As little girls, we don’t dream of broken hearts and abortion. To help women truly flourish, we need to stand with them.”
