Posted on 04/04/2011 7:11:52 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
"An Open Letter to Fellow Conservatives"
The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives--urged on by conservatives opposed to abortion--has voted to defund Planned Parenthood. On this issue, Republicans and conservatives are dead wrong.
My grandmother was a friend and supporter of Margaret Sanger, one of America's earliest, most effective advocates of birth control.
I met Sanger several times before her death in 1966 and was impressed b y her intellect and her commitment to many issues, not the least of which was enabling every woman to be "the absolute mistress of her own body" as she put it.
I didn't agree with everything the formidable Mrs. Sanger espoused. Yet I respected her dedication to making health-care and birth-control services available to all Americans, especially to those with low incomes, no insurance and no other recourse to medicall services.
And I admired her fearless, relentless readiness to stand up for what she believed, despite decades of angry, mean-sprited, often hypocritical attacks on her ideas and her character.
So I am aggravatged by the continuing attacks on Sanger and her primary legacy, the Planned Parenthood network that still serves so many Americans today.
Now the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives--urged on by conservatives opposed to abortion--has voted to defund Planned Parenthood.
On this issue, Republicans and conservatives are dead wrong.
Abortions are a minor aspect of Planned Parenthood's mission to provide reproductive health care, education, and other services to Americans, regardless of income.
More than 90 percent of its work focuses on preventive care, including preventing unintended pregnancies that often lead to unwanted, neglected and abused children.
In Pittsburgh and across America, Planned Parenthood offices help people to make better decisions about whether to have children. They help to arrance adoptions for women or couples unable to raise a child but unwilling to end a pregnancy.
Many of their clients are poor Americans who cannot afford birth-control measures that can cost $50 a month or more.
Of the 10,000 to 12,000 people who use local Planned Parenthood services, about 20 percent are teenagers, half are ages 20 to 30 and the rest are older than 30.
Of course, no one wants tenneagers to get pregnant. Yet far too many do--and they need reliable, honest advice about what to do next. For many of them, Planned Parenthood is the only reliable source of that advices. For many others, Planned Parenthood is the only safe, reliable source of counseling to avoid getting pregnant in the first places.
If not for Maragaret Sanger's vision and bravery, many poor Americans would have no place to turn for birth-control measures and counseling or for other health-care services.
To take that away makes on sense.
Dick Scaife
(Mr. Scaife is chairman of Trib Total Meida Inc., parent company of hte Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and its family of publications. Note: this op-ed was originally published in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Paid for by Republicans for Planned Parenthood, a project of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Scaife can support PP all he wants with his own dollars.
He makes no case for PP getting any of MY dollars.
If PP is such a great damn idea, can it not survive on its own?
Few things this damn gub mint does that makes me madder than them taking MY MONEY to pay for others abortions.
That’s just wrong.
ping!
I wonder how he fit so many lies into such a small space.
no sir, you are not a fellow conservative, when you are on the wrong side of both social and fiscal policy, you are not on our side.
It’s nauseating.
I would rather be unwanted, neglected and abused than dead. Mr. Scaife (a billionaire) has everything including life. He would like to shut the door of life on those who stand on the other side.
The real story of Margaret Sanger, whom he lauds (calling into question his rationality) has not been told in any broad sense. She was a eugenicist, a racist and a Nazi sympathizer. An absolutely murderous villain and elitist.
Scaife has funded many conservative causes but this issue reveals that he expends his efforts on the things that the wealthy elites have always been interesed in: Money and Power.
He is no social conservative.
nowhere in the constitution is the federal government given the power to regulate abortions. therefore by default it is a states rights issue.....defund it
Birth control costs 50 bux a month?
Hell, you can get a condom for a quarter in sex shops!
So....at .25 cents each, a woman would need to have sex almost 7 times a day to reach her magic 50 dollar mark.
Where is she, I want to meet her..... :)
What page of the constution authorizes the funding.
Isn't he the founder and funder of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that Hillary Clinton said was behind the effort to bring her "husband" down?
I wish I had the money to do another full page ad connecting Margaret Sanger with eugenics and Black genocide.
Why is the only approved PP solution to unwanted pregnancies abortion? Abortion isn't a form of preventative case, is it?
Legs closed = FREE.
His claim that PP is the only source of quality pregnancy care is an abject and profoundlky insulting lie. There are many very high quality prolife counseling centers even in benighted Pittsburgh. He is correct that prenatal death centers are very limited. They should be outlawed as unconstitutional.
Practically everyone who has met one of history’s monsters in a social setting will tell you how they’re charming, intelligent, respectful, etc., etc., etc. Maybe it’s the halo effect of all the bright lights and reflected adulation of the masses. Perhaps these people think, “wow, I’m chatting up Herman Goreing, Fidel Castro or Barak Obama! He’s charming, much nicer than the guy who would bomb London, kill thousands of Cubans or pass Obama Care!”
For ever after, those who met famous monsters must tell everybody that they knew them, they basked in their glory; unlike all of you who only read history, I was part of it! So, to collect this glory, they become apologists and by their apology tell you how great they themselves are that these famous and wonderful people talked to them. I’d imagine in the liberal mindset, having been lectured in person by Margaret Sanger is rather like having been spoken to by God or an angel.
pro-life bump!
What goes around comes around, Scaif.
I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born. ~Ronald Reagan, quoted in New York Times, 22 September 1980
Pretty much says it all. The woman was pure evil
When a person has to tell me they're a 'fellow conservative' I doubt. Same with 'this won't hurt' or 'you can trust me'. When the person IS, when it really won't hurt, when you can truth - IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE SAID.
I always suspected that Scaife and Godzillary were in cahoots during that whole Clinton/Lewinsky farce.
bump!
Unbelievable...people should research Sanger and listen or read her speeches...the woman was no different than a Nazi. She worshiped eugenics...evil...evil..person.
What an achievement more than 50 million dead because of her!
What is it with these left progressives...they just aren’t happy until millions die especially the helpless!
Look at Rachael Carson...ban DDT and kill millions in Africa...but that isn’t racism?
This is not a hard decision.
The ruling class “elites” in DC are spending $1.5T a year more than they bring in, $5,000 per man, woman, and child in our country. Even if you ignore the evil of taking our money by force and using it to kill the innocent, we cannot afford to do everything “nice” that someone in our country wants our federal government to do. For the sake of the children that liberals permit to survive, we need to cut the federal budget back to the essentials.
Even those who think the world needs more dead babies should be objective enough to see that the taxpayers can’t afford to kill as many of our children as they want to kill. We need to scale back the federal government to only those enumerated powers in the Constitution, and killing the next generation doesn’t make the list. If Scaife wants more dead infants, he needs to pay for that himself, not with money that our (living) children will eventually have to repay.
Yeah, and that one little murder should be cancelled out by all the good that Mr._____ did. Is that the logic?
That "minor" aspect is what all the controversy is about.
The same Margaret Sanger who pushed for and received legislation allowing for the forced sterilization of "undesirables?" The same Margaret Sanger who hated black people? The same Margaret Sanger who wanted to only allow certain "desirable" persons to breed? The same Margaret Sanger who pushed for the forced abortion of "undesirable" children? The same Margaret Sanger whose writings appear below:
On blacks, immigrants and indigents:
"...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born." Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, referring to immigrants and poor people.
On sterilization & racial purification:
Sanger believed that, for the purpose of racial "purification," couples should be rewarded who chose sterilization. Birth Control in America, The Career of Margaret Sanger, by David Kennedy, p. 117, quoting a 1923 Sanger speech.
On the right of married couples to bear children:
Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child, she wrote in her "Plan for Peace." Birth Control Review, April 1932
On the purpose of birth control:
The purpose in promoting birth control was "to create a race of thoroughbreds," she wrote in the Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921 (p. 2)
On the rights of the handicapped and mentally ill, and racial minorities:
"More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control." Birth Control Review, May 1919, p. 12
On religious convictions regarding sex outside of marriage:
"This book aims to answer the needs expressed in thousands on thousands of letters to me in the solution of marriage problems... Knowledge of sex truths frankly and plainly presented cannot possibly injure healthy, normal, young minds. Concealment, suppression, futile attempts to veil the unveilable - these work injury, as they seldom succeed and only render those who indulge in them ridiculous. For myself, I have full confidence in the cleanliness, the open-mindedness, the promise of the younger generation." Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (Bretano's, New York, 1927)
On the extermination of blacks:
"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," she said, "if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon
On respecting the rights of the mentally ill:
In her "Plan for Peace," Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed "feebleminded." Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107
On adultery:
A woman's physical satisfaction was more important than any marriage vow, Sanger believed. Birth Control in America, p. 11
On marital sex:
"The marriage bed is the most degenerating influence in the social order," Sanger said. (p. 23) [Quite the opposite of God's view on the matter: "Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled; but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." (Hebrews 13:4)
On abortion:
"Criminal' abortions arise from a perverted sex relationship under the stress of economic necessity, and their greatest frequency is among married women." The Woman Rebel - No Gods, No Masters, May 1914, Vol. 1, No. 3.
On the YMCA and YWCA:
"...brothels of the Spirit and morgues of Freedom!", The Woman Rebel - No Gods, No Masters, May 1914, Vol. 1, No. 3.
On the Catholic Church's view of contraception:
"...enforce SUBJUGATION by TURNING WOMAN INTO A MERE INCUBATOR." The Woman Rebel - No Gods, No Masters, May 1914, Vol. 1, No. 3.
On motherhood:
"I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine." What Every Girl Should Know, by Margaret Sanger (Max Maisel, Publisher, 1915) [Jesus said: "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep... for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed (happy) are the barren, and the wombs that never bear, and the breasts which never gave suck." (Luke 23:24)]
"The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (Eugenics Publ. Co., 1920, 1923)
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She was extremely disturbed.
They’re simply lying about the percentages of “care” that they provide. It’s all in how it’s measured and what they count as an allocation of resources.
It’s probably closer to the truth that the percentages are reversed - 10% “other”, 90% abortions.
It’s probably closer to the truth that the percentages are reversed - 10% “other”, 90% abortions.
Planned Parenthood alone murders approximately ONE THOUSAND INNOCENT AMERICANS EACH DAY, I really don't give a damn what percentage of their business that is.
This is like arguing that the Nazis should have been supported because great highways were more important than murdered Jews.
Nowhere in the constitution is the federal government given the power to tell one citizen they can arbitrarily murder another citizen and call it a "right."
therefore by default it is a states rights issue.....defund it
No, its a human rights issue. Both the federal and state governments have a duty and obligation to defend and protect innocent human life. Therefore, innocent human life should be protected at both the federal and the state level.
Doesn’t matter if it was just 1%, or 0.001%, abortions.
A murder is a murder, and why should my tax dollars go to support murderers?
At one time, I seriously considered subscribing to Richard M. Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, because our local Johnstown Tribune Democrat newspaper is such a pathetic excuse for journalistism. However, given this piece of demonic propaganda, I’ll never spend a dime supporting any Trib Total Media Inc. owned business.
Do Quinn and Rose broadcast on a station owned by Trib Total Media Inc. ?!?
Imagine that. Planned Parenthood funding an ad to argue for retaining their government funding.
This is an out-and-out lie, not to mention just a stupid statement.
I'm betting that not one single person walked through their doors last year and said: "I'm here to discuss ideas on better ideas about family planning before we get around to starting ours."
The BS meter is pegged out on that one.
One in the same.
Richard Mellon Scaife is only a conservative when he stands to profit from it.
This turkey supported the corrupt John Murtha for years and his paper, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, endorsed him many times.
For him to support PP proves he’s not a genuine conservative.
***************************
Agreed. There is nothing more fundamental than the protection of human life. Making it a states' rights issue makes no sense at all, unless we don't believe that human life is of much value.
Agreed. “Family Planning” is a euphemism for “contraception and abortion”.
Ah yes, the libertarian "pro-choice by state" approach.
Do you believe that the babies being murdered are persons? If so their deaths are already unconstitutional. If you do not believe they are persons, why do you care about abortion at all?
First, I'm not a supporter of Planned Parenthood. At all.
Second, by the phrasing of your statement, I'd guess you weren't an unwanted, neglected or abused child. (And, no, I don't think abortion is the answer. Ever.)
I’m in agreement there... I’m just pointing out the lies of these people, as everyone should - call them on it when they lie and show others that they lie, that they can’t be trusted.
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