The following article I wrote was originally published in The Detroit News last summer. As the newly elected Congress begins debating the defunding of Planned Parenthood, it is good time to revisit the logic of Planned Parenthood’s defense of their abortion business. Since this article was published, the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives issued a troubling and detailed report of possibly illegal activities at Planned Parenthood centers around the nation and called for the organization’s funding to be removed.
At the height of the global financial crisis that started in 2007, the term “too big to fail” entered the lexicon of the average American.
Essentially, the “too big to fail” theory asserts that certain corporations, usually financial, are so vital and the services they provide so valuable that their failure would be disastrous. Therefore, these corporations must be protected and preserved at all costs. Moreover, they must be supported by the government’s financial and political powers, even if this means using taxpayer money to bail them out when they are in trouble.
Because of their protections, “too big to fail” organizations often commit abuses, believing they will not be punished. These abuses lead to real damage to real people. Retirement savings that took a lifetime to build are stripped away overnight; homes are ripped away from their owners; jobs that give people dignity and purpose are lost in an instant. Our very humanity, exemplified by the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” we have a right to pursue, is endangered in the name of profit.
So, when I reflect back on how these “too big to fail” organizations were treated during the financial crisis, I was struck by how eerily similar Planned Parenthood is being treated by many of our political leaders and major media outlets in light of disturbing Center for Medical Progress videos that expose its grisly practice of selling the tissue and organs of aborted fetuses.
Consider the facts.
The Senate failed to pass a bill that would have pulled all of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, which is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The reasons for the failure of the bill’s passage are epitomized by a video statement that Hillary Clinton released before the vote took place. In it, she says, “I’ll never stop fighting to protect the ability and right of every woman in this country to make her own health decisions,” and “Republicans … are calling to defund Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive health care … When politicians talk about defunding Planned Parenthood, they are talking about blocking millions of women, men and young people from life-saving preventive care.” In other words, they are too big to fail.
Key political leaders in the Senate, Congress, and the Obama administration have failed to condemn or speak out against Planned Parenthood. No one in the White House brass has even admitted to watching the videos, and instead of investigating Planned Parenthood, they encourage an investigation of the Center for Medical Progress, which produced the undercover videos.
Key mainstream media outlets such as ABC, CBS, NBC, USA Today, the Washington Post, and social media outlets like BuzzFeed, have either not covered the story or covered it in a very limited way, typically with a bias toward explaining away Planned Parenthood’s misdeeds.
Planned Parenthood locations are in just about every state in the country. Yet, only 12 states have launched investigations. Moreover, the Department of Health and Human Services, which facilitates Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, has taken no steps to launch an investigation. Given the seriousness of the content of these videos, every state with Planned Parenthood facilities should be investigating this matter.
When one considers the above, it is clear that there is a view in some very important circles that Planned Parenthood is “too big to fail” and, as a nation, we must protect it at all costs.
Unfortunately, Planned Parenthood knows this. Indeed, over the years, it has leveraged this perspective — just like any big financial institution would to capture nearly 80 percent of the market share of the “Abortion and Family Planning” industry — in large measure due to the hundreds of millions of dollars it receives annually from the federal government and the political and media cover its influence buys. And now, just like during the recent financial crisis, we are led to believe that we must turn a blind eye to what appears to be illegal and immoral human trafficking by Planned Parenthood.
And just like the abuses meted out by negligent financial institutions, Planned Parenthood strips away the humanity of the unborn for money. What is suppose to be the safest place in the world for a fetus, its mother’s womb, is intruded upon, as its organs are stripped and sorted. The fetus is ripped away from its “home” and the dignity that all human lives should be afforded is lost in an instant. Our first right, the right to life, is endangered in the name of profit.
In my view, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s advice in the midst of the financial crisis should apply to the Planned Parenthood situation. He once said, “If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big.”
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