The election of America’s first black president was supposed to symbolize how far our nation has come in its respect for human equality…which makes Barack Obama’s speech to Friday’s 2013 Gala for Planned Parenthood – an organization dedicated to violently disposing of “inconvenient” children – all the more grimly ironic.
The address was Obama at his most manipulative, as he spent twelve minutes bemoaning false choices, smearing motives, stoking fears, gushing over killers, and ignoring critics’ actual arguments – all without uttering the word “abortion” once. Let’s take a tour of the lowlights:
But obviously this is a special national conference, because it’s been nearly a hundred years since the first health clinic of what later would become Planned Parenthood opened its doors to women in Brooklyn.
A hundred years is a long time, and Planned Parenthood hopes your attention span doesn’t go back that far. But the truth is decidedly uglier than the picture Obama paints of “quality health care to women.” It began with Margaret Sanger, a student of anarchists and racists, a woman by her own admission unsuited to “children or anything which needs attention or consideration,” and a champion of various eugenic schemes, including requiring women to get permits to bear children and promoting birth control among blacks for the express purpose of reducing the “portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”
I’m reminded of those very early efforts and all the strides that we’ve made in subsequent decades. And I also think about the millions of mothers and daughters and wives and sisters, friends and neighbors who walk through those doors every year.
And when 55 million children were taken through those doors, they were incinerated, flushed down the drain, taken away in a medical waste truck, or tossed in a dumpster. Them, Obama can’t be bothered to think about.
And for nearly a century now, one core principle has guided everything all of you do — that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. It’s a simple principle […] there’s nothing conservative about the government injecting itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor […] Forty years after the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to privacy, including the right to choose, we shouldn’t have to remind people that when it comes to a woman’s health, no politician should get to decide what’s best for you.
It’s generally a strong sign that you’re on the wrong side of an issue that you can’t even describe it without lying. Obama, his speechwriters, and every single person sitting in the audience know that women’s right to decide “their own health” isn’t the issue; killing their children, thereby ending someone else’s “own health,” is. Such rank dishonesty is hardly unique in politics, but it is doubly noxious coming from Obama, who originally sold himself as a post-partisan uniter above this sort of thing. In The Audacity of Hope, he claimed to believe that “our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect,” and in less celebratory venues he admits that abortion is a “difficult moral issue and that people of goodwill can be on both sides” of it. If you really believe any of that, Mr. President, start acting like it.
So the fact is, after decades of progress, there’s still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century […] When you read about some of these laws, you want to check the calendar; you want to make sure you’re still living in 2013.
Here we have a one-two punch of tying basic pre-born rights to an image of a society that keeps women chained to the kitchen, and an appeal to one of progressive faith’s shakier articles: the idea that there’s some intrinsic link between newness and enlightenment. For what it’s worth, killing innocent babies for their inconvenience actually isn’t modern – it dates all the way back to ancient Rome. By Obama’s logic, abortion is even more regressive than the patriarchal nightmare of 1950s suburbia.
No insurer should get to decide what kind of care that you get. The only person who should get to make decisions about your health is you. That’s why we fought so hard to make health care reform a reality. That principle is at the heart of the Affordable Care Act.
Obama took a fairly lengthy detour into selling ObamaCare and enlisting the abortion crowd’s aid in proselytizing for it. Again, the truth is different. Women will suffer right alongside men from the rising premiums, lost insurance, lost jobs, and doctor shortages the law is poised to inflict on the country, to say nothing of the conscience rights it imperils.
But when it comes to your patients, you never let them down – no matter what.
Except for when they do. Which is often. PP of Southeastern Pennsylvania head Dayle Steinberg admits to having received reports of the conditions at Kermit Gosnell’s West Philadelphia death camp, which PP apparently did nothing about. PP of Delaware has suspended in-clinic abortions at a Wilmington location which is under investigation by the state Division of Public Health. At many PP locations, Live Action has exposed indifference to statutory rape and sex-trafficking, and their policy of lying to women…and more is on the way.
As usual, what Obama didn’t mention is just as revealing as what he did. Amidst all that glowing talk of Planned Parenthood blessing women with everything imaginable except abortion, he left out the facts that abortion dwarfs prenatal care and adoption referrals or the notable drop in PP’s providing of cancer screenings and prevention. Also left unmentioned was the omission of the last quarter of 2011 in PP’s latest annual report. And the women abortion psychologically devastates? Hey, speaking for them would have killed the mood.
It’s perversely fitting that the president concluded this farce in a way even he will have trouble topping:
Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.
What do you think God is more inclined to listen to: politicians’ scripts and butchers’ applause, or the cries of His murdered children? How do you think He feels about being asked to bless such a bloody affront to His word? Obama himself seems to view the Almighty as just another rhetorical prop, and he’d better hope that’s all God is…because if not, he’s in for one more campaign, for a term somewhere lasting longer than four years, in the eyes of someone who’s much harder to impress than the American electorate.
