Every now and then, abortion friendly publications reveal what’s happening behind the scenes of abortion behemoths like Planned Parenthood – and sometimes, hidden within these pieces, we see admissions that Planned Parenthood’s supporters feel they’re fighting an uphill battle in garnering support.
Last month, progressive publication ThinkProgress wrote a glowing piece about the Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s pro-abortion election efforts. More recently, at Fusion, Katie McDonough profiled 18-year-old Audrey Leonard, a Planned Parenthood activist who seems to think that pro-life legislators are “all old white men.” Leonard and other workers, we are told, are doing “unglamorous, often dejecting work” in get-out-the-vote efforts for the abortion giant:
It wasn’t fun, exactly. But neither was having two dozen states with anti-abortion Republicans controlling both the legislature and the governor’s office—a combination that has created something of a hermetic political seal against progressive efforts to expand access.
McDonough rightly notes that “the real story… has been playing out in the states,” regarding the passage of pro-life laws – something which has certainly been noticed and lamented by Planned Parenthood. She also notes Planned Parenthood’s sense that they need to educate voters on the importance of local, not just federal, elections. Yet McDonough overestimates the support for Planned Parenthood.
After all, as McDonough admits, many scandals have plagued Planned Parenthood, and this has been a long time coming; it’s not just because of the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood employees haggling over the prices of aborted fetal body parts. The videos, she says, were a “convenient accelerant to a long-burning fire.”
Part of the reason for that “long-burning fire” is because many young people are now pro-life. Even on college campuses, Students for Life of America has far more campus chapters than Planned Parenthood.
Another reason for the “long-burning fire” is that women know they don’t actually need Planned Parenthood. Groups like Feminists for Life, Students for Life of America’s Pregnant on Campus Initiative, as well as the more than 2,000 local, community pregnancy resource centers reach out to girls and women on a regular basis with support.
As a side note, Planned Parenthood can’t stand pregnancy centers. They even claim on their very biased website that “[d]eciding what to do about an unplanned pregnancy can be very complicated. It may be made even more so by so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers.'” As Planned Parenthood’s primary service and “solution” offered to pregnant women and teens is abortion, it is easy to see why they wouldn’t want to “complicate” things by offering alternatives to abortion.
Planned Parenthood is also outnumbered by more comprehensive community health centers — more than 1,000 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), which don’t commit abortions — compared to just over 660 Planned Parenthood locations.
Strangely, though, it’s as if McDonough thinks Planned Parenthood is an underdog when it comes to political power. Hardly. (See, for example, these 25 federal-level politicians who have received money from Planned Parenthood, and note how they vote.)
And yet, despite all their political clout, it turns out that Planned Parenthood needs young voters – you know, the generation that lost about a third of its population to abortion. McDonough says low voter turnout among the younger generations is “really, really bad for organizations like Planned Parenthood.”
How ironic.
