As Live Action News’ Carole Novielli reported earlier today, Planned Parenthood has received a surge in donations — nearly 80,000, at the time I write this — since the election of Donald Trump as America’s 45th president, along with his running mate, pro-life Indiana Governor Mike Pence. As Novielli noted, these donations can’t possibly be flooding in due to some sort of financial need on Planned Parenthood’s part — after all, they sank $30 million into Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid, and they pay their CEO nearly a million dollars annually, not to mention the salaries of the organization’s other well-compensated executives.
The question is, why this sudden outpouring of donations?
Some say it’s because of pro-life legislation signed into law in Indiana by Vice President-elect Pence. This legislation, challenged in court by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, would, says Live Action News’ Calvin Freiburger, require abortion facilities to “provide women with the opportunity to view an ultrasound of their child at least 18 hours prior to performing abortions,” among other things. (The ACLU claims requiring an ultrasound could place a financial hardship on some facilities, as well as women — but the fact is that ultrasounds are considered standard procedure before abortions.)
Many abortion supporters have recently chosen to donate to Planned Parenthood in Pence’s name. This is quite a leap from the previous pro-abortion response to the pro-life state law, when abortion supporters started a “Periods for Pence” movement — which consisted of calling the governor’s office to report their monthly menstrual periods. As Calvin Freiburger noted, that particular campaign was evidence that “abortion fans are so endlessly, stubbornly desperate to pretend they’re sticking up for something other than murder that there is absolutely nothing too absurd for them to say in defense of that illusion.” It seems that this time, they’ve decided to spend their money not on phone calls but on directly funding abortions at Planned Parenthood.
But again… was this response naturally spurred by the election of Trump and Pence? A tweet shared here makes it appear as if Planned Parenthood is encouraging donations in Pence’s name:
The tweet makes it hard to tell whether Planned Parenthood is merely capitalizing on the Pence donations… or whether they had a role in initiating it.
Today, Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior vice president, wrote an article for Operation Rescue, describing a phone call she received yesterday from a Planned Parenthood representative. The woman, who said she was calling from New York, urged Sullenger to make a commitment to make a monthly financial commitment to support Planned Parenthood. Sullenger says people have donated to the abortion giant before in her name, and that’s likely why she received an appeal for donations. She writes:
She [the Planned Parenthood caller] described to me what a dangerous time we were facing. With Donald Trump as the President-elect, and both houses of Congress solidly in the hands of “anti-choice” politicians, she insisted that we, as women, face losing our reproductive health care, our health insurance, and our birth control. She told me how the “anti-abortion” folks aim to defund and close Planned Parenthood and end abortion.
Naturally, this caused Sullenger to question the sudden surge in donations to Planned Parenthood:
As I hung up the phone, I recalled headlines of stories I had seen the past couple of days across the Internet discussing the “spike in donations” to Planned Parenthood. It occurred to me that this spike – like the Soros-funded staged protests of Trump’s election – was not organic.
It appears that this uptick in donations to Planned Parenthood is primarily the result of an aggressive, high-pressure, fear-based fundraising campaign that tries to scare the wits out of women so they will open their pocketbooks.
But what’s so interesting about all this is that Planned Parenthood isn’t just “scaring the wits out of women” for donations; the pro-abortion media is giving the organization free publicity by reporting on the donations, causing many other donors to jump on the bandwagon.
This isn’t the first time Planned Parenthood has contacted supporters, stoking fears that if Planned Parenthood is defunded, somehow women won’t be able to get their birth control or healthcare anywhere else. But the truth is that with approximately 13,000 Federally Qualified Health Centers and community health centers in this country — compared to Planned Parenthood’s approximately 650 facilities — women are in no danger of losing access to real quality healthcare or birth control.
Federally Qualified Health Centers and Community Health Centers offer the same services that Planned Parenthood offers (minus abortion). But they also offer mammograms — something Planned Parenthood does not offer its patients, despite CEO Cecile Richards’ previous claims. And Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion services have been on the decline, which means women must be getting this healthcare elsewhere already.
Planned Parenthood, clearly fearing that its days as a taxpayer-funded organization are numbered, is once again fundraising on that fear.
