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LIFE DIGEST: Planned Parenthood exploits Mother’s Day to raise money for abortion


WASHINGTON (BP)–Planned Parenthood Federation of America — known far better for terminating motherhood than for promoting it — nonetheless found a way to turn Mother’s Day into an excuse for fundraising.

The country’s leading abortion chain, which performed nearly 290,000 abortions in 2006, observed Mother’s Day by asking for donations in honor of mothers in the days surrounding May 11. Under the homepage heading “Planned Parenthood Celebrates Mother’s Day,” PPFA told visitors to its website they could make “a gift in honor of your mother or someone else you love this Mother’s Day.”

A link took visitors to a form on the website for credit card donations. The form included a space for the name of the person in whose honor or memory the gift was to be given. It also enabled the donor to include a person to whom a Mother’s Day card could be sent from PPFA.

“For Planned Parenthood to ask for ‘Mother’s Day Gifts’ is beyond appalling,” said Janet Morana, co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness campaign, in a written statement. “This is an organization that has turned Mother’s Day into a painful reminder of terminated children for millions and millions of women. To ask for money on this day so that it can traumatize even more women is the ultimate in insensitivity.”

Silent No More describes itself as the world’s largest network of women and men harmed by abortion.

PPFA President Cecile Richards and actresses Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow wrote e-mails asking for Mother’s Day gifts to Planned Parenthood, according to LifeNews.com.

“We think that Mother’s Day is the perfect time to think about what it means to support mothers in this country. There is no organization that we know of that supports motherhood and all that it means more than Planned Parenthood,” Danner and her daughter, Paltrow, wrote in their e-mail, seemingly with all seriousness.

It does not appear PPFA lacks funds. It surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time last year, more than $336 million of that coming in government grants and contracts.

ARCHBISHOP WARNS GOVERNOR — The Kansas Senate failed to hold Gov. Kathleen Sebelius accountable for her veto of a pro-life bill, but that hasn’t deterred her Roman Catholic archbishop from trying to.

Senators voted 25-14 in an April 30 attempt to override the Democratic governor’s veto of legislation that would have increased restrictions on second- and third-term abortions. That roll-call total fell short of the two-thirds majority required for an override.

Meanwhile, Archbishop Joseph Naumann has informed Catholics in the Kansas City, Kan., archdiocese he has again urged Sebelius not to receive communion without renouncing her support of abortion.

In renewing a plea he made to the governor in August, Naumann recently asked the governor “to respect my previous request and not require from me any additional pastoral actions,” he wrote in a column in the May 9 issue of the archdiocese’s newspaper. He said he wrote Sebelius after recently learning she had received communion at one of the parishes in the archdiocese.

He has met with Sebelius “several times over many months to discuss with her the grave spiritual and moral consequences of her public actions by which she has cooperated in the procurement of abortions performed in Kansas,” Naumann wrote. The archbishop said he hoped his request “will provoke her to reconsider the serious spiritual and moral consequences of her past and present actions.”

Kansas has been described as “the late-term abortion capital of America,” largely because of a Wichita clinic operated by George Tiller, the country’s best-known provider of second- and third-term abortions.

OKLAHOMA OVERCOMES VETO — The Oklahoma legislature provided a convincing rebuke to Democratic Gov. Brad Henry April 17, overriding his veto of legislation that a leading pro-life organization described as the best ultrasound law in the country.

The Oklahoma Senate voted 37-11 and the House of Representatives 81-15 to overturn Henry’s veto. The Senate easily achieved the required two-thirds majority despite being equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.

The new version of Oklahoma’s ultrasound law requires a medical worker to perform an ultrasound on a woman seeking an abortion, display the image of the unborn child and explain the sonogram, the Tulsa World reported. The mother is not required to view the image.

It is “the strongest, most protective ultrasound law in the nation,” said Mary Spaulding Balch, state legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC). “They are doing everything possible to ensure that a mother is given the opportunity to see her unborn child in real-time and learn all the facts before making the life and death decision of abortion.”

Oklahoma is one of 13 states to adopt legislation mandating that abortion doctors at least offer a woman the opportunity to see a sonogram of the child in her womb, according to NRLC.

STOP GIRL-KILLING, SINGH SAYS — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decried sex-selection abortion in an April 28 speech as his government seeks to reverse a huge gap between male and female babies.

“One of the most inhuman, uncivilized and reprehensible practices is the practice of female feticide,” Singh said at a national meeting on saving girls. “The patriarchal mindset and preference for male children is compounded by unethical conduct on the part of some medical practitioners assisted by unscrupulous parents who illegally offer sex-determination services.”

Ultrasound machines are being used to identify the sex of children in the womb, fueling the abortion onslaught against girls and producing the growing imbalance between the sexes.

There are 927 females for every 1,000 males from birth to 6 years old in the populous Asian country, according to the 2001 census. The ratio is much worse in some Indian states. It is 798 girls per 1,000 boys in the state of Punjab, Singh said.
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Tom Strode is the Washington bureau chief for Baptist Press.