I was looking through my drafts of half-written blogs tonight to find something too finish and post for #flipthescript/NAM/NaBloPomo and came across this one, that I thought had gone up months ago. Oops! I’ve added some updated material to it. It’s another Spyv Spy story (see National Adoption Month and National Association Awareness Month , Is there a difference? for the first one.
I used to work for Planned Parenthood. For a short while during my unemployed days of the 1970s I was part-time public relations “director” at my local PP office. A friend of mine was the local director, so I guess you can call it neppotism. I mainly wrote press releases and PSAs and designed and set up displays for meetings and public events My most memorable moment was doing a cold call to WTIG-AM in Massillon. Ohio to “educate” the public about pap smears. In those pre-internet days, I’d only called the station to get some information about sending press releases, and before you could say “come on down” someone decided they needed to fill in some white noise, and I was live on-the air for 5 or 7 minutes advising women on why they should get one. At least I didn’t have to describe the procedure.
I’ve always supported PP though we have ideological differences, mainly its opposition, in some states, to OBC access. I have to admit that to a point, then, I’ve enjoyed its recent stepped-in-it misfortune, just on general principle. Tempting as it may be, this blog isn’t about PP’s current woes, it’s about this:
In May Life News reported that Planned Parenthood of Northern New England–Vermont Section- is a baby dump site.
When the news broke that Planned Parenthood in Vermont had signed on to baby dumping, I sent a say-it- isn’t-so-Joe email to them, and if memory serves me, also called, but I received a response from neither. The “ad” itself is way too busy for an ad, and instead appears to be a flyer or brochure that someone scanned and posted online. A few commenters on rightwnig news sites questioned its validity, but they also didn’t know about “safe haven” laws, so I think that was the crux of the doubt.
This PP news was pretty much ignored in AdoptionLand, but anti-aborts went nutso. You’d think that PP was hustling women to turn in their newborns for body parts (though in May, that wasn’t an issue.)
Sarah Zagorski from LifeNews opined: Planned Parenthood is hardly a safe place for newborns considering the fact they support late-term abortion and consistently refuse to protect infants born alive at abortion facilities.
Dr. Mark Hodges, writing for Lifesite News, chimed in: Many pro-life advocates strongly support Safe Haven laws. But with abortion as its top-grossing “service,” Planned Parenthood is not a “safe haven” for any preborn baby. The pro-abortion giant – which takes the lives of over a third of a million American babies each year – favors late-term abortions up to the moment of birth
Evoking Goodwin’s Law, The American Coalition for Life posted: There is no way Planned Parenthood can be a “safe haven” for anyone, let alone a newborn baby. Their legacy is one of genocide, not saving people. In my opinion, this is the same as allowing the death camps in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories the status of a safe, no-fire zone during the war where everyone, including the Jewish people are allowed to go for safety. This is an appalling development in the war to stop abortion.
Dave Andrusko, from National Right to Life, obviously upset that PP had moved into his “neighborhood,” blustered: Why could/would/should it surprise you that Planned Parenthood, which corrupts everything it touches, also leads the galaxy in hypocrisy? He implied, as much as he could without threat of a Cease and Desist Letter that PP had an ulterior motive for being on the “safe haven” list: Planned Parenthood is the most aggressive seller, promoter, and exporter of abortions anywhere in the world. It is quite willing to abuse unborn babies up to the last possible moment–the very same babies who are capable of feeling excruciating pain as they are killed.”
Andrusko finally suggested that newborns be simply dropped off not only at the standard locations (hospitals and fire stations) but at “churches and synagogues, and adoption agencies. None of these facilities would have taken that very same baby’s life just a short while before.” He failed to note that those locations don’t offer medical services for either mother or child.
What Zagorski, Hodges, and Andrusko, et al failed to note, however, is that Planned Parenthood does lots of adoption referrals, even though adoption is not their business, And that must really gripe them.
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Back in the late 1990s and early 2000’s the late Bill Pierce, founding president of the National Council for Adoption, used to complain to me that Planned Parenthood had made more adoption referrals than CPCs (compulsory pregnancy camps..er, I mean “crisis pregnancy centers.”) I don’t know where he got his figures or if that’s even true, and I can’t find any reference to Pierce’s statements online. What I did find though,are figures from annual Planned Parenthood Annual Reports listing the number of adoption referrals:
2009-2010: 977
2010-2011: not available
2011-2012: 2300
.2012-2013: 2197
20013-2014: 1880
TOTAL: 7343
Much to the consternation or anti-aborts, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky rents office space to Independent Adoption Center Midwest, a franchise operation out of California. Ben Johnson writing in LifeSite News complains about IAC’s “low adoption rate.” In 2012 “only” 182 children were placed. Only?
And one of Gladney’s dirty little secrets is that in the 1980s it did abortion referrals of some sort.
I can’t find statistics on the number of adoption agency referrals CPCs have made in the same time period, nor do I know if they exist, but it strikes me that anti-aborts are just upset that Planned Parenthood has moved into their turf, and are “saving babies” that should have been saved by them.
That is bad enough. Now they’re grousing that Planned Parenthood is encroaching in their “safe haven” territory. (Keep in mind that not all “safe haven” advocates are particularly anti-abortion, though they tend to be.) To the best of my knowledge, of course, no RTL office or CPC, with their phony doctors and nurses is a designated “safe haven” in any state.
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I have no idea what PP was thinking when it signed on to baby dumping, other than somebody someplace has internalized anti-abort criticism and is trying to counter. While adoption is a viable option for problem pregnancies, baby dumps are not. Planned Parenthood (which should know better) and anti-aborts (which don’t) both use adoption and adoptees as a cheap tool for their own agendas. It would be nice with a cherry on top if these do-gooders would just drop their hammers, pull their noses out of our rights –including our quaint old right as newborns to not be legally abandoned– and business, and go tend to their own.
