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Women in America: Once Protected and Honored, Now Objectified

Once upon a time in America, society demanded civility and honored women and motherhood.

But honor seems to have been tossed by the wayside in this modern era and exchanged for a cheap view of the female sex.

What happened to so utterly change the widespread estimation of the “fairer” sex?

First, we must understand that our nation’s mores were built upon a biblical worldview. We read this in Proverbs:

Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. (Proverbs 31:30)

He who finds a wife finds a good thing,
And obtains favor from the Lord. (Proverbs 18:22)

The Founders — many of whom were devout Christians and the rest of whom believed in a Creator and respected biblical Christianity — envisioned a country of free men and women and families devoted to one another, worshipping freely.

During the years when Americans adhered to the original worldview of the first settlers and Founders, individuals were treated with respect. Each person was acknowledged as created by God and thus intrinsically valuable.

Women were protected and honored. Pregnant women were protected and honored. Mothers were respected and honored.

But with the twentieth century came some wholly destructive changes.

In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942, and ushered in the radical notion that babies in the womb had no intrinsic worth. Their worth was determined by their usefulness to society.

Sanger convinced many women that motherhood was not a blessing and that some people by virtue of their mental abilities or race were not worthy of life. This was a monumental lie based on a Darwinist worldview.

Planned Parenthood’s nefarious founder accepted and promoted the philosophical assumptions of “materialism“:

a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.

Sanger’s philosophical beliefs contributed to the erosion of the view of mankind as the height of God’s creation, replacing it with a “utilitarian” viewpoint. Utilitarianism deems people worthy of life based on their capacity to contribute to society.

In the span of twenty years many Americans were persuaded that people were not intrinsically valuable because God created them, but rather, a person’s value was dependent upon their utilitarian value.

Next came Hugh Hefner and Second-wave feminists like Helen Gurley Brown and Gloria Steinem who persuaded men and women that sex apart from marriage and procreation was fine and dandy. Throw off the chains of old thinking and embrace your sexuality!

Helen Gurley Brown convinced several generations of women to engage in sex outside the safety of a loving marriage. Ms. Brown taught young women, enamored of Cosmo and the free love mantras of the day, that the sole goal of sex was orgasm and pleasure.

Counter that with God’s wondrous idea: sexual intimacy was to be the height of oneness between a man and wife, and the means of procreation. Marriage was intended to be a safe place, a refuge, where a loving husband and wife could raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

But indeed, if humans are not wondrously created by a Creator but, instead, are merely biologic units, then sex is no different than any other biological activity.

Hugh Hefner with his slick Playboy magazine indoctrinated decades of men of all ages with the lie that unrestrained sex is a terrific recreational activity and women’s bodies are the intended venue. Playboy perpetuated the view of women as playmates.

If a man believes that women are good for a thrill, like a ride at Six Flags, he is less likely to consider her character and heart important. He becomes concerned only with her body.

Hefner was a proponent of the “if it feels good do it” movement and convinced millions of men to throw off  archaic, puritanical ideas about womanhood and sex.

It was a very short step from nullifying mankind’s intrinsic value to sex with no restraint.

Add to that horrendous mix of immoral indoctrination the radical feminist movement. If Cosmopolitan magazine was the “bible” of free love, sex and orgasm for the single girl, Gloria Steinem was the prophetess of the sexual revolution.

Steinem founded Ms. magazine in 1969, which happily harmonized with Cosmo, further disseminating the dogma of free love and sex without the tedious tether of marriage.

The devotees of Brown and Steinem–who were once college radicals burning bras, protesting the Vietnam War, rebelling against parental authority, and belittling the institution of marriage–are now ensconced in America’s halls of academia teaching malleable young minds.

We now know what happens when you teach a nation that people have no intrinsic value, that women are mere means to pleasure, that women should want unfettered sex whenever and however, and that humans in utero are disposable.

Women in 2017 are beginning to realize that they’ve been sold a rotten to the core bill of goods.

In 2017, America has been forced to reckon with the consequences of almost a century of humanistic, unbiblical, immoral ideology. Free “love” is neither love nor free. It’s hedonism and it’s costly.

Women are objectified. Sexually transmitted diseases proliferate. Unwanted pregnancies terminated by abortion result in, not only murdered babies, but severe depression in women. Men, being denied their rightful duty and purpose to protect women and children, are emasculated and devalued.

How can we turn this around? How can we once again teach the amazing worth of each man and woman, boy and girl?

How can we teach men that women are not playmates to use but, rather, persons created in the image and likeness of God?

How can we turn back the clock to a time when men honored women–a time when men would stand when a lady entered a room?

America can change only if we as a nation turn to the principles that first made us great: God’s principles.

America can become a safe place once more for women and babies if we teach the transcendent truth that “all men [and women] are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Americans can realize the great heritage of our nation if we repent and acknowledge the words of the Psalmist:

Happy are the people whose God is the Lord!


End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, IFI has a year-end matching challenge to raise $160,000. That’s right, a great group of IFI supporters are colluding with us to provide an $80,000 matching challenge to help support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2018!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477




The Law of the Harvest: America Sows Free Love and Reaps Heartbreak

America was founded as a beacon of light, a refuge to those who only wanted to worship the God of the Bible as they saw fit. Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, were infused with biblical precepts and a presumption of a Creator and His transcendent Truth.

For over 200 years this experiment in liberty flourished, lighting the world with the light of Truth and Righteousness.

At times during our nation’s history, Americans en masse veered toward the broad path to destruction. And at every departure from upright and moral living, a preacher or prophet of sorts would proclaim the words of God’s inspired Book, people would repent, and our national character would be righted.

God told Israel the truth, which still applies today:

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. Deuteronomy 30:19

But in the twentieth century, culture-changers assaulted our society, teaching people to exchange the truth for lies, with cascading and calamitous results. The following have deceived people to choose death, rather than life.

Margaret Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966), a nurse and proponent of birth control and eugenics, inspired the Nazis with her notions of breeding and forced sterilization to weed out the less than desirable races. “Nurse” Sanger was the Founder and first president of Planned Parenthood.

As I wrote in 2014:

she formed the organization, American Birth Control League [est. 1921], which would eventually become Planned Parenthood [est. 1952].

And like the modern day organization, cloaking its true agenda in palatable verbiage such as “family planning” and “choice,” Margaret’s goal was far more evil than the respectable facade she presented.

. . .

Sanger was a Darwinist who embraced a utilitarian view of human life, and proposed to rid our nation of the criminal element and “inferior races” through abortion and breeding programs.

Thanks to Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood has cruelly slaughtered approximately 300,000 pre-born children a year since Roe v. Wade, or about 13.2 MILLION total.

Thanks to Sanger, life has been cheapened, and sexual intimacy divorced from the God-ordained, relationship of marriage.

Sanger pushed America to sow the seeds of destruction and the devaluation of life with abortion and a utilitarian view of human life.

Subsequently we’ve reaped the harvest of catastrophic and crippling depression in generations of women.

Alfred Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was a biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and a sexologist. He is known as the “Father of the Sexual Revolution” and founded the famed Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Kinsey shook the nation with his books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

These books revealed to a shocked and somewhat titillated population things they had never known about themselves: That between 30-45% of men had affairs, 85% of men had had sex prior to marriage, that a staggering 70% of men had slept with prostitutes, and that between 10 and 37% of men had engaged in homosexual behavior.

Alfred Kinsey’s studies, in retrospect, paved the way for hedonistic depravity. And how did Kinsey obtain the findings reported in his books?

Kinsey himself was a pervert and a sex criminal.

For example, where did he get all of his data on the “sexual behavior of children”? The answer is nothing short of chilling. Dr. Judith Reisman (whose research has since been confirmed time and time again) explained in her groundbreaking work Sex, Lies and Kinsey that Kinsey facilitated brutal sexual abuse to children as young as two months old, to get his so-called research:

Kinsey solicited and encouraged pedophiles, at home and abroad, to sexually violate from 317 to 2,035 infants and children for his alleged data on normal “child sexuality.” Many of the crimes against children (oral and anal sodomy, genital intercourse and manual abuse) committed for Kinsey’s research are quantified in his own graphs and charts.

. . .

The Father of the Sexual Revolution was a sado-masochistic bi-sexual sex criminal who facilitated the sexual torture of infants and children.

Thanks in large part to Alfred Kinsey, sexual deviancy and pedophilia were heralded as normal, and any and all sexual activity divorced from the God-ordained, relationship of marriage.

Kinsey taught America to sow the seeds of depraved sexual activity without the good and protective constraints of the previously held Judeo-Christian worldview.

Subsequently our nation has reaped the harvest of lives ruined, marriages wrecked, and all-time high venereal disease — now called Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

More than two million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were reported in the United States in 2016, the highest number ever, according to the annual Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Increases in STDs are a clear warning of a growing threat,” said Jonathan Mermin, M.D., M.P.H., director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. “STDs are a persistent enemy, growing in number, and outpacing our ability to respond.”

An epidemic accelerating in multiple populations—impact growing in women, infants, and gay and bisexual men.

Timothy Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer. He was an enthusiastic advocate of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, drop out” affected a generation of rebellious youth in, for the most part, the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Leary’s disciples turned onto drugs, tuned into sex, rock and roll, and dropped out, in many cases dropped dead, including: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Cole (The Association), Gram Parsons (The Byrds), Tommy Bolin (Deep Purple), Gregory Herbert (Blood, Sweat & Tears), Keith Moon (The Who), Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols), Lowell George (Little Feat), and more.

Thanks to the influence of Timothy Leary, a generation or more of Americans chose to escape life via drugs, and became enslaved by LSD, heroin, barbiturates, and other dangerous substances. Thousands of young Americans followed Leary’s direction into an untimely death.

Timothy Leary cajoled Americans to sow the seeds of escapism and societal anarchy and substance abuse.

Subsequently America has reaped the harvest of crime, ruined lives, and death.

Helen Gurley Brown (February 18, 1922 – August 13, 2012) was an author, publisher, and businesswoman. She pushed women in America to throw off their sexual inhibitions. Brown’s book, Sex and the Single Girl (1962) “encouraged women to become financially independent and experience sexual relationships before or without marriage.”

Brown gained further prominence as the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 – 1997. Continuing her mantra of sex without boundaries, Cosmo under HGB “set itself apart by frankly discussing sexuality from the point of view that women could and should enjoy sex without guilt.”

To this day Cosmopolitan is known for its edgy (aka immoral) sexual agenda and in September of this year alone reached over 32 million readers.

Thanks to Helen Gurley Brown, millions of young women were led to believe that sexual intimacy can and should be enjoyed without the burden of marriage and fidelity.

Ms. Brown deceived teen girls and women to sow the seeds of wanton, narcissistic sexuality.

Subsequently American women reaped the harvest of babies out of wedlock, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and ruined lives and marriages.

Hugh Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) was an American businessman, magazine publisher and playboy. He rejected the Christian faith of his parents in exchange for a life of rampant sexual conquest. “Hef” was Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Playboy magazine. Wikipedia describes Playboy:

Playboy is an American men’s lifestyle and entertainment magazine. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner’s mother. Notable for its centerfolds of nude and semi-nude models (Playmates), Playboy played an important role in the sexual revolution and remains one of the world’s best-known brands, having grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

After his death in September of this year, many in the world were lauding Hugh, such as frequent Playboy model and one-time Playmate of the Year, Jenny McCarthy, who gushed:

[Hugh was] the most good-hearted, caring, generous, supportive friend, and mentor…his zest for life was contagious

McCarthy tweeted:

But what is the truth?

The truth is that Hugh Hefner disseminated the lies that women are playthings (i.e. Playmates), objects of men’s desires and lust, and tools for gratification.

Contrast that with God’s admonition for love within marriage:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Ephesians 5:25

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:33

Thanks to Hugh Hefner, pornography became commonplace in America and women were stripped, not only of their clothing, but of their intrinsic worth. Thanks to Hef, sex became a meaningless pastime, a means to a few moments of physical pleasure, rather than the height of intimacy between husband and wife and a means of procreation.

God created sex to be beautiful and meaningful. Satan, the great liar who loves to offer counterfeits, twists it into a vile, animalistic act.

Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine led our culture to sow seeds of dehumanizing women, and separating sexual intimacy from the safe, loving environment of true marriage.

And subsequently America has reaped a culture teaming with sexual users and predators. Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and the other users in Hollywood and elsewhere didn’t happen in a vacuum, or by accident.

The Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Galatians 6:7

If we repent, as individuals, and as a nation, we can re-light our beacon. But Americans must follow Truth and Life. We must choose Blessing not Cursing. We must reject the false promises and evil teaching of Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey and Timothy Leary and Helen Gurley Brown and Hugh Hefner and others.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Proverbs 14:12

If Americans choose Truth, then we’ll reap blessing and life and life abundantly.

But only if we choose Truth.


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Are Progressives Targeting Minorities with Abortion?

Pro-life advocate Chris Iverson noted this fact in an article here at IFI recently:

The U.S. abortion rate is the lowest in recorded history! The Guttmacher Institute found that there were 14.6 abortions for every 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2014. That’s lower than the abortion rate in 1973 (when the Roe v. Wade case was decided) and every year since then.

Republicans in Washington, D.C. are taking steps to defund Planned Parenthood and prevent the use of federal taxdollars for abortions.

Illinois Democrats are going in the opposite direction. State Representative Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago) has re-introduced legislation that would remove all prohibitions on taxpayer funding of abortions through HB 40. Here is the Illinois Citizens for Life:

For decades, Illinois has had a public policy of not paying for abortions under the Medicaid assistance program except for life of the mother. Court decisions have added “health” and rape and incest. The Illinois law went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1979 and was upheld in its entirety in 1980.

Survey after survey has shown that a clear majority of Illinoisans, even those who say they are pro-choice, do not want their tax dollars paying for abortions.

HB 40 would remove this ban and require taxpayer funding of abortions for any reason throughout the full nine months of pregnancy. If this bill passed into law, the thousands of these abortions added [estimated at 15,000 or more each year] would be paid for only with state taxpayer dollars, since the federal government prohibits paying for abortions other than for life, rape and incest.

Pro-life lobbyist Ralph Rivera says that there would be no limit to the number of abortions a woman could have using tax-dollars, and the abortion could be for any reason through all 9 months of the pregnancy. There would also be no age restriction, so minors would be eligible for taxpayer funded abortions.

A large part of the targeted population in HB 40 is those who are covered under Medicaid. The website Illinois Health Matters provides a breakdown on the “Demographics of the Medicaid Population,” noting that “about 600,000 Illinois residents age 19 to 64 with low income became eligible for Medicaid.”

According to Illinois Citizens for Life, the year the Illinois Law was passed that prohibited taxpayer funding, “over 12,000 abortions were paid for under Medicaid with tax dollars.” Since the number of abortions was substantially higher when tax-dollars were used, it should be expected that more abortions will be performed once the restriction is removed. One question that follows is who is going to be having those abortions? Note these numbers:

  • Blacks make up 30 percent of the Medicaid recipients in Illinois while they are 14 percent of the whole.
  • Latinos make up 16 percent of the Medicaid recipients in Illinois while they are 16 percent of the whole.
  • Asians make up 5 percent of the Medicaid recipients in Illinois while they are 5 percent of the whole.

Since 51 percent of the Medicaid recipients in Illinois are minorities, whether it is intended or not, the passage of HB 40 will increase the number of abortions in the minority community.

A bit of history is important here. IFI contributor Tami Jackson wrote in an article titled “Margaret Sanger’s Dream Come True: Eugenics by Abortion”:

[Margaret] Sanger was a nurse and a birth control advocate in the early 20th century. But more importantly, she formed the organization, American Birth Control League, which would eventually become Planned Parenthood.

. . .

[She] espoused sinister motives for advancing birth control and abortion: she fully endorsed eugenics for the betterment of race and society.

Sanger was a Darwinist who embraced a utilitarian view of human life, and proposed to rid our nation of the criminal element and “inferior races” through abortion and breeding programs.

Margaret Sanger was born in 1879 and died in 1966, so this issue is not new. Today, Sanger is seen as a feminist hero and the Democratic Party supports full funding for Planned Parenthood.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state to ask him/her to vote AGAINST this pro-abortion bill.  Ask them to consider how abortion providers and eugenicists are promoting abortion to destroy the innocent pre-born human lives of black and brown babies.


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Will This Be the Final Nail in Planned Parenthood’s Coffin?

lauries-chinwags_thumbnailThe national pro-life organization Live Action has just released a bombshell video that darn well better be the final nail in the coffin of Planned Parenthood—a coffin brimming with baby corpses.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, in a futile effort to persuade the public that the pro-death organization she heads is all about women’s “health,” has publicly stated that Planned Parenthood provides prenatal care. In so doing, she clearly suggested and the gullible public believed that all Planned Parenthood facilities provide prenatal care. Surprisingly, that’s not what Live Action found in its undercover investigation.

Of the 97 Planned Parenthood facilities Live Action contacted, only 5 provided prenatal care. Live Action’s short video provides persuasive evidence that Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards lied through her pearly whites.

Here’s a sampling of the responses featured in Live Action’s video:

Tempe, AZ: “Planned Parenthood offers abortions, so they don’t offer prenatal care.”

Albany, NY: “No Planned Parenthood does prenatal care, hon.”

Farmington, NM:“We don’t offer prenatal care at Planned Parenthood…We specialize in abortions. You know that’s what our ultrasounds are for, to see how far along the, um, patient is.”

Elizabeth, NJ: “We do birth control, things like that—terminations.

Cornell, NY: “We tell you you’re pregnant, and then we offer…to do the abortions.”

Merrillville, IN: “No, we don’t do prenatal services. I mean it’s called Planned Parenthood. I know it’s kind of deceiving.

Dallas, TX: “We only offer termination services.”

Ironically when the undercover patient asked where she could receive prenatal care, the Planned Parenthood operative recommended Care Net, the type of crisis pregnancy center that “progressives” accuse of not caring about women and babies.

Racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood, and today’s money-sucking  organization bears the morally corrupt values of its founder. While blacks comprise 12 percent of the population, they comprise 28 percent of abortions, a statistic that would please Sanger who was hell-bent on ridding the world of blacks:

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

In Sanger’s proposed “baby code” she recommended the extermination of those deemed unfit:

[F]eeble-minded persons…those afflicted with inheritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities…should be sterilized or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.”

Which populations do “progressives” today exploit to promote abortion as an act of compassion? Don’t death merchants talk about feticide as a compassionate act for babies with tragic physical anomalies? Aren’t children with Down Syndrome—in earlier, less enlightened times referred to a “feeble-minded”—being aborted in numbers that should offend and outrage all decent people?

Cecile Richards is an attractive corporate mask that conceals incomprehensibly evil acts, and where there is evil, there is deception.


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The Gates Foundation: Philanthropy Cloaked Abortion

When William “Bill” Henry Gates III was born to William Henry Gates II and Mary Maxwell Gates, in Seattle in 1955, little did they know he would grow up to be (reportedly) the world’s wealthiest man.

Bill III and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, and grew the fledgling company into an $85 billion multi-national computer software business. Bill transitioned from CEO to CSA (Chief Software Architect) in 2000, the year he and wife, Melinda, established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). Then in 2006 Bill backed off, becoming part-time at Microsoft and full-time at BMGF.

Three trustees shepard BMGF, commonly called The Gates Foundation: Bill Gates III, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett. Buffett (Chairman/President/CEO of $65B Berkshire Hathaway Inc.) is ranked as one of the world’s wealthiest men (net worth of about $66 billion) and has vowed to disburse 99% of his fortune to charities and causes mostly via the Gates Foundation. One Buffett pet cause being the Democratic party; he endorsed Hillary Clinton in her run for president.

The Gates Foundation, by all appearances is a humanitarian endeavor, seeking to help the least of these throughout the world, and especially in Africa. As written on the opening page of the BMGF website:

WE BELIEVE

That by giving people the tools to lead healthy, productive lives, we can help them lift themselves out of poverty.

Every year, millions of people find ways to transition out of poverty—by adopting new farming technologies, investing in new business opportunities, or finding new jobs. We know women and girls have a unique power to reshape societies. When you invest in a woman’s health and empowerment, it has a ripple effect, helping families, communities, and countries achieve long-lasting benefits.

A “woman’s health and empowerment” — now that’s an interesting phrase. Just what might that mean?

Click on the link under A CLOSER LOOK Help women make informed family-planning decisions and more of the BMGF agenda is revealed:

The Challenge

Voluntary family planning is one of the great public health advances of the past century. Enabling women to make informed decisions about whether and when to have children reduces unintended pregnancies as well as maternal and newborn deaths. It also increases educational and economic opportunities for women and leads to healthier families and communities. Family planning is a smart, sensible, and vital component of global health and development.

However, more than 220 million women in developing countries who don’t want to get pregnant lack access to contraceptives and voluntary family planning information and services. Less than 20 percent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and barely one-third of women in South Asia use modern contraceptives. In 2012, an estimated 80 million women in developing countries had an unintended pregnancy; of those women, at least one in four resorted to an unsafe abortion.

Significant challenges stand in the way of making contraceptives more widely available and accessible, including insufficient donor and developing country funding, lack of appropriate products that meet users’ needs, weak distribution systems, lack of reliable monitoring and data collection mechanisms, and cultural and knowledge barriers.

Farther down The Foundation Strategy is defined:

Our Strategy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Family Planning program is working to bring access to high-quality contraceptive information, services, and supplies to an additional 120 million women and girls in the poorest countries by 2020 without coercion or discrimination, with the longer-term goal of universal access to voluntary family planning.

With our partners, we support national governments that have committed to the goals of FP2020 and are leading the development and implementation of their own country-specific plans.

Foundation support includes assessing family planning needs, particularly among the poorest and most vulnerable populations; identifying access barriers and funding gaps; developing and testing interventions; sharing evidence-based practices; promoting accountability through real-time performance monitoring and data collection; and fostering coordination among governments, partners, and donors.

The verbiage repeatedly refers to “contraceptive information” and “contraceptives and voluntary family planning” and then, tucked away, “at least one in four resorted to an unsafe abortion.”

So, a whole lot of talk about women and contraception information and worries about unsafe abortions. What is starkly missing from the page is any mention of “life” or “babies.”

Also of note, The Gates Foundation operates with entities aligned with FP2020: Family Planning 2020. What is the goal of that initiative?

FP2020 is an outcome of the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning where more than 20 governments made commitments to address the policy, financing, delivery and socio-cultural barriers to women accessing contraceptive information, services and supplies and donors pledged an additional US$2.6 billion in funding. Since then, the number of countries with FP2020 commitments has grown to 36 and, in 2014 alone, donors provided US $1.4 billion in bilateral funding for family planning—32 percent more than in 2012.

Led by an 18-member Reference Group, operated daily by a Secretariat, and hosted by the United Nations Foundation, FP2020 is based on the principle that all women, no matter where they live should have access to lifesaving contraceptives.

One of the FP2020 guiding principles:

  • Universal access to voluntary contraceptive information, services and supplies, within the context of integrated programs to achieve sexual and reproductive health and rights and the health-related MDGs.

The website, like its partner the Gates Foundation, is full of mentions of contraceptive information and “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” And even more telling, the list of “Core Partners“:

  • The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • The Department for International Development (DFID)
  • UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund
  • USAID (The United States Agency for International Development)

Much has been made of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investment in African charities, but a closer inspection yields something less of a true philanthropic effort to save lives, and more of an effort to advance family planning and abortion. And this pro-abortion, utilitarian worldview was cultivated in Bill Gates III from a young age.

In a 2003 interview, Bill Moyers questioned Gates about his interest in advancing “family planning”:

MOYER: But did you come to reproductive issues as an intellectual, philosophical pursuit? Or was there something that happened? Did you come upon… was there a revelation?

GATES: When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that. And so it’s fascinating. At the dinner table my parents are very good at sharing the things that they were doing. And almost treating us like adults, talking about that.

My mom was on the United Way group that decides how to allocate the money and looks at all the different charities and makes the very hard decisions about where that pool of funds is going to go. So I always knew there was something about really educating people and giving them choices in terms of family size.

Indeed, Bill Gates II, a prominent Seattle lawyer, also served on the board of Planned Parenthood. His wife, Mary, Bill III’s mother, was the first female president of King County’s United Way. The United Way shunts a portion of all donations, unless earmarked otherwise, to Planned Parenthood.

Gates Sr. is Co-Chair of the Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

All of these connections explain Bill Gates’ implicit pro-abortion biases, they all add up. And The Foundation doesn’t dicker, it contributes major bucks to abortion providers. Live Action News’ Josh Craddock wrote in June 2014:

Fr. Boquet notes that, “The Gates Foundation has in the past and will continue to give tens of millions of dollars to the largest abortion providers in the world, including International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International. These large sums of money will undoubtedly expand the reach and influence of the abortion industry.”

According to the Gates Foundation grant database, the Foundation gave Planned Parenthood of America, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Planned Parenthood of Western Washington about $71 million from before 2009 through 2013. Additionally, the Gates Foundation gave $46.1 million to Marie Stopes International in 2012 alone.

A year later, Micaiah Bilger writes for Life News:

The Gates Foundation promised to give an additional $120 million to Family Planning 2020 programs that support “the rights of women and girls to decide when and how many children they want to have,” the news website All Africa reported today.

. . .

Both Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International, two of the largest abortion businesses in the world, are partners in the global Family Planning 2020 initiative, according to a press release from the initiative.

Now factor in BMGF Trustee Warren Buffett, Hillary Clinton’s BFF. Remember that Planned Parenthood awarded Hillary the Margaret Sanger Award in 2009 and the Democratic Presidential candidate has pledged to have “Planned Parenthood’s back if elected president.” In fact, not only is Mrs. Clinton pals with Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards, she was also good friends with Cecile’s mother, Ann Richards.

The mafia had a term to describe who they were, “cosa nostra,” translated that means “our thing.” And “our thing” to Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill Gates Sr., Mary Gates, Warren Buffett, Hillary Clinton, Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood, United Way, Marie Stopes International, and FP2020 is a desire to advance an abortion agenda around the globe.

And at its heart, abortion countermands the culture of life admonished in Deuteronomy:

I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.

Yes indeed. Mainstream Media adores The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and touts their Progressive “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA),” but that’s just one small endeavor and not the heart of what the Microsoft billionaire really does with his fortune.

The word Philanthropy comes from the Greek: philos loving + anthrōpos man. Alas, Philanthropy, Gates-style, has absolutely nothing to do with real love of human life.



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When the Tyranny of Abortion Rights Trump Religious Liberty

For the past two decades, America’s slide down the slippery slope of atheist-flavored secular humanism has accelerated at breakneck speed.

Once upon a time Dr. Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop were scorned and ridiculed when they suggested such a “slippery slope” existed in terms of the devaluing of human life. In retrospect, Schaeffer and Koop were radically prescient in their predictions.

Almost daily we are assailed with ever more cases of individual Americans strong-armed to violate their sincerely-held religious beliefs. In fact, the only belief system afforded respect by the Progressives (Socialists) is the secular, utilitarian and humanistic worldview.

Since the days of Dewey and Wilson, Progressives have schemed and plotted and maneuvered, relentless in pursuit of the goal: a secular utopia administrated by so-called “enlightened elitists.”

Add to the mix, the eugenicist depravity of Margaret Sanger, founder of  “the American Birth Control League, which would eventually become Planned Parenthood,” and the final concoction is a godless set of mores where humans are just another entity in the animal kingdom.

I wrote of Sanger in the 2014 article, Margaret Sanger’s Dream Come True: Eugenics by Abortion:

And like the modern day organization, cloaking its true agenda in palatable verbiage such as “family planning” and “choice,” Margaret’s goal was far more evil than the respectable facade she presented.

Sanger waged a crusade for legal and safe contraceptives, and for legal and safe abortions. The Left and Planned Parenthood would have you believe she was a paragon, an angel of mercy for women in desperate need.

. . .

The real Margaret Sanger espoused sinister motives for advancing birth control and abortion: she fully endorsed eugenics for the betterment of race and society.

Sanger was a Darwinist who embraced a utilitarian view of human life, and proposed to rid our nation of the criminal element and “inferior races” through abortion and breeding programs.

Think of this: Roe v. Wade pitted the right of privacy of the woman against the right to LIFE of her unborn child, and the Burger court ruled in favor of privacy.

I noted in my 2014 post, Roe v. Wade: The Shameful History of an Egregious SCOTUS Decision:

Justice Byron White wrote a stern dissent:

I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment.

The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.

The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand.

Now, 43 years and 57 million slaughtered babies later, our nation suffers under the corporate burden of guilt and the predictable loss of public virtue.

And somehow this wrongly decided “right to privacy” ruling, this right to terminate the life of the unborn for all or any reason, with no support whatsoever in our U.S. Constitution, supersedes all other rights and worldviews. So much so that taxpayers, in spite of their biblical objections and abhorrence of this infanticide, are forced to pay for abortions and abortifacients.

But even worse, those who object and refuse to take part in abortions, abortion referrals, or abortifacient prescribing, are punished.

A recent case in Rockford, Illinois, Mendoza v. Martell, is illustrative of the tyranny of the pro-abortion movement and its leaders.

Sandra Mendoza, a Rockford nurse and devout, pro-life Catholic, informed Public Health Administrator “Dr. Sandra Martell, of her conscientious objection to participating in any way in abortions, or the distribution of abortifacients.” Nurse Mendoza quickly discovered that the right to abortion trumps her First Amendment-guaranteed religious liberty:

Dr. Martell gave Ms. Mendoza two weeks to either quit or accept a demotion to a temporary job as a food inspector. Mendoza refused the demotion and was forced to resign in July 2015.

The suit seeks damages under the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act which prohibits public officials from discriminating against a person in any manner because of their conscientious refusal to participate in any way in the provision of abortions.

Once again, the U.S. Constitution is being circumvented to bolster this hell-bent “right to privacy.”

The compelling argument in favor of Sandra Mendoza:

Mendoza’s attorney, Noel Sterett, a partner at Mauck & Baker, LLC, in Chicago, says, “Ms. Mendoza has spent her life serving children and protecting life. People disagree on whether abortions end human lives, but I’d hope we can all agree that pro-life doctors and nurses should not be forced out of employment on account of their faith or commitment to protecting life.”

Nurse Mendoza is to be commended for her pro-life conviction, even in the face of job loss. But the fact is, no American should ever have to face the loss of their livelihood because of their biblical convictions. The First Amendment allows for freedom of religion (NOT worship, as the Left would try to assert), an inalienable right which cannot be absconded by government.

However, Illinoisans are now seeing an effort to strengthen the tyranny of the abortion lobby via Senate Bill 1564:

…lawmakers in the General Assembly passed SB 1564 in an effort to expand abortion services in Illinois. This legislation would force medical professionals and many pregnancy care workers to violate their conscience by forcing them to refer patients for medical procedures they find morally objectionable such as abortion, sterilization and certain end-of-life care.

People of faith in Illinois, people of biblical worldviews, must not relent; they must vote and vote in record numbers to send this bill directly to the paper shredder.

The Left has brought us to this slippery slope of dehumanizing people in the womb, people at the end of life, and people in-between birth and natural death. The journey toward this broad road to destruction was approached stealthily, circuitously.

The time has come for conservatives, for Believers, to stop the descent down the slippery slope predicted by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop.

The Bible is clear: we are told to choose life. The U.S. Constitution is clear: the First Amendment, codifies our God-given religious liberty and freedom of speech.  The Illinois State Constitution is clear: Article 3 forever guarantees the free exercise of religion and religious opinions.

Now it’s time to stand on that truth, one bill, one case, at a time, and never relent in OUR pursuit of what IS intrinsically, morally right.

Take ACTION: Click HERE and ask Governor Rauner to uphold conscience rights for Illinois medical personnel.  Urge him to veto this ominous proposal. No American should be forced by the government to violate his or her deeply held convictions.

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Please also call Governor Rauner’s office at:

(217) 782-0244 — Springfield
(312) 814-2121 — Chicago


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Planned Parenthood, An Unnecessary Evil

So many organizations and entities have noble and good beginnings. For instance “The Ivies” and the Seven Sisters colleges, most of which were either Christian schools or seminaries that, over the last century, have departed faith moorings.

Other organizations have nothing but evil inceptions; case in point Planned Parenthood.

The original intent of Planned Parenthood has been veiled with a facade of honorable work, but the truth is despicable to the core.

Planned Parenthood’s predecessor, The American Birth Control League, was founded by Nazi-inspiration Margaret Sanger, the godmother of modern eugenics, in 1921. As I wrote in the article, Margaret Sanger’s Dream Come True: Eugenics by Abortion:

The real Margaret Sanger espoused sinister motives for advancing birth control and abortion: she fully endorsed eugenics for the betterment of race and society.

Sanger was a Darwinist who embraced a utilitarian view of human life, and proposed to rid our nation of the criminal element and “inferior races” through abortion and breeding programs.

“To deal with the problem of resistance among the black population, Sanger recruited black doctors, nurses, ministers and social workers ‘in order to gain black patients’ trust’ in order ‘to limit or even erase the black presence in America’.”

Many Americans found the name, The American Birth Control League, anti-family and distasteful. Thus, the name was changed to The Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, with Sanger as president.

Just think about an entity whose stated goals included:

  • Children should only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health
  • Sterilization of the insane and feebleminded
  • To enlist the support and cooperation of legal advisers, statesmen and legislators in effecting the removal of state and federal statutes which encourage dysgenic breeding*

This was no family-friendly, baby-friendly organization; this was an entity designed from its inception to limit the breeding of inferior people, and to, inversely, encourage the breeding of “superior” humans.

Today Planned Parenthood performs approximately 300,000 abortions per year — about 1/3 the total number of abortions performed annually in the United States. Extrapolated out since Roe v. Wade in ’73, that would be approximately 13 million babies slaughtered by taxpayer-funded PP.

Present day Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards has remarked that “abortion is key to women’s opportunity.”

Opportunity? How is killing one’s own child the key to any opportunity?

The post-abortive women I’ve spoken to found abortion key to only guilt, overwhelming shame, and brokenheartedness, and only found reprieve via the grace and forgiveness of God.

Think on this; we are instructed in Deuteronomy 30:

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live

But Planned Parenthood was founded and conceived as a means to choose death and cursing, and should not receive one dime of taxpayer assistance.

Unfortunately, currently the taxpayer moneys fund $528 million of PP’s budget per annum. Is it any wonder God’s hand of protection around America seems to be departing?

And contrary to the noisy, incessant arguments made by Planned Parenthood and the radical pro-aborts, there is a viable alternative, Community Health Centers, which actually help, rather than harm, women, men, and children.

there are over 1,200 Community Health Centers serving more than 24 million people at over 9,200 sites located throughout all 50 states and U.S. territories.

Every day, health centers meet escalating health needs and bring good health to needy communities, without regard to family income, health insurance status, race, culture or health condition. In communities fortunate enough to have a health center, fewer babies die, emergency room lines are shorter and people live longer, healthier lives.

Three words in the descriptive trump all else: “fewer babies die.”

The ancient Hippocratic Oath includes:

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

Though physicians in the 21st century typically take the oath of their particular medical school upon graduation, and not a standardized oath, the content of such oaths points toward “healing arts” rather than ghoulish methods of death and dismemberment of innocents.

Planned Parenthood was, and is, a nefarious organization, conceived by wicked woman. Thanks to PP and other abortion providers, over 57 million babies have been murdered in 43 years: over 57 million infants are in heaven, and Margaret Sanger, barring a Paul-like, deathbed conversion, is paying the due recompense in hell.

Given the REAL choice of Planned Parenthood OR Community Health Centers, the former snuffing out lives, the latter saving lives, America should choose Community Health Centers.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send Governor Bruce Rauner an email or fax asking him to cease all state business with Planned Parenthood in Illinois.

Let’s demolish once and for all the Planned Parenthood facade of “health provider” and choose better: let’s choose life, and insist our elected officials understand the consequences of not supporting our choice.

*The belief that deterioration of the human gene pool occurs by the increased survival and reproduction of people with undesirable traits.


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What Political Correctness Has Wrought

If you’re wondering how America and Western Europe went from marriage-centered societies to post-Christian sexual anarchy abetted by massive government growth enforced by brutal political correctness in just a few decades, let’s just say it was no accident.

Here’s a brief history:

The progressive left has been in a death struggle with religion, the family, capitalism and morality itself since becoming a political and philosophical force during the French Revolution.

With the advent of Marxism in the mid-19th century, the battle intensified, with the left eagerly expecting the collapse of capitalism.

When the West failed to succumb to an economic and political upheaval of the type that seized Russia in 1917, the strategy changed. To liberate people from free market capitalism, it became necessary to liberate people first from bourgeois morality.

Man’s natural inclination is to provide for himself and his own extended family, then for his neighbors and community. Socialism must remove existing loyalties and institutions in order to replace them with government power. That’s why progressives have been a major force behind abortion, easy divorce, single-parent welfare incentives, pornography, collective child-rearing and sexual excess of all kinds. All of these manifestations of the progressive disease weaken the natural family. As families crumble, the state steps in to take their place.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci saw the value of this in the 1920s, calling for his fellow revolutionaries to “capture the culture,” that is, infiltrate the institutions that transmit cultural values. So they did, especially in the universities.

Revolutionaries such as John Dewey, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, all of whom waxed poetically about the Soviet Union, inspired progressive educational and social policies that weakened support for organized religion, marital fidelity and the family while empowering the state.

With the help of like-minded people in Hollywood, they hammered away at social conventions of all kinds. The weapons of choice were radical individualism and moral relativism, which they peddled on college campuses to credulous liberal faculty who passed it on to their students.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, with the advent of the pill, Playboy magazine and mass communications, Western civilization was ripe for takeover by a heretofore alien, ideology of limitless sex. Of course, people weren’t told about the downside of “free love” — the destruction of families, social chaos, the loss of freedom to disagree, and a tightening statist grip on economic and intellectual liberty.

In his masterful new book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage,” author Paul Kengor traces a direct line from the founders of communism to today’s liberal social “reformers.”

The elements change with the times, but not the ultimate objective, which is to “progress” indefinitely toward an evolved, socialist Eden where all is shared and all are equal. Mr. Kengor notes that the progressive canon changes rapidly, and in ways that even progressives cannot always predict.

“But we do know this much: what is seemingly inconceivable to all of us right now, including to progressives themselves, may become the dogmatic position of progressives in a generation,” he writes.

For example, “just five years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” supported “retaining the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman by 2012, that was completely gone. Now, anyone who opposed redefining marriage — and who stands now where virtually all Democrats stood a mere two decades back — is derided as a bigoted extremist.”

A case in point: The ninth World Congress of Families, which will be held this coming week in Salt Lake City, has drawn fire from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign and other leftist organizations, which falsely and strategically portray the pro-family gathering as a “hate” event and the speakers as bigots. I have done some writing for the WCF, and will be on a panel about “How the Culture Undermines Life and the Family.”

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, who had an affair with his children’s nurse and mistreated his own family badly in other ways, railed against religion and the middle-class family: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

His co-author, Frederic Engels, was a prolific philanderer who preached free love in an 1884 essay as a benefit of political revolution, a few decades before abortion became the holy sacrament of the political left:

“With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the ‘consequences’ … Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse …?”

The progressives’ contempt for the family contrasts with the timeless definition of marriage given in Genesis 2:24 and reiterated by Jesus: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”


This article was originally posted at the WashingtonTimes.com.

 




Margaret Sanger, Busted

In late August a group of about two dozen African-American pastors staged a protest outside of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The National Portrait Gallery isn’t the kind of D.C. landmark you normally associate with protests, but then again, this wasn’t your standard-issue D.C. protest. It was an attempt to set a long-distorted historical record straight.

The protesters demanded the removal of a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger from an exhibit entitled “Struggle for Justice.” To understand why they’re making this demand, you need to know about both the exhibit and Sanger’s views.

The exhibit features a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Besides King, honorees include Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez, the Catholic mystic/farm labor leader.

Nearly all of those honored were controversial in their lifetimes and some remain so today. But to include Sanger among them is embarrassing. The exhibit tacitly acknowledges this by telling visitors about Sanger’s “association with the eugenics movement, which included promotion of forced sterilization of those deemed mentally unfit” while reassuring them that the movement “for a time was endorsed by many of the era’s prominent thinkers.”

This doesn’t even rise to the level of a half-truth. It’s more like a quarter-truth. For starters, none of the other honorees, many of whom were Sanger’s contemporaries, were associated with the eugenics movement in a way that she was. In fact, Sanger remained part of the movement even after some of the movement’s founders and luminaries had repudiated their previous views.

More to the protestors’ point, the exhibit says nothing about Sanger’s racism. The inconvenient truth is well-documented. In “The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of An Unscientific Idea,” Robert Wald Sussman wrote the following about Sanger: “Margaret Sanger . . . advocated mass sterilization, incarceration of the unfit, and draconian immigration restrictions, and she included [Madison Grant’s book] ‘Passing of the Great Race’ on the eugenics reading list of her journal Birth Control Review.”

You probably haven’t heard of Madison Grant or his book. Grant was the godfather of American scientific racism, and his book was called “the most influential tract of American scientific racism” by Stephen Jay Gould.

One of Grant’s biggest fans was Adolf Hitler, who quoted liberally from “Passing of the Great Race” and referred to the book as “my bible.”

This was the book Sanger was recommending to her followers.

As the Reverend E. W. Jackson said at the protest, “If Margaret Sanger had her way, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King would never have been born . . . It’s an outrage the national museum would honor such a person and add insult to injury by putting her in the Struggle for Justice exhibit.

Truer words have seldom been spoken. Yet the museum insists that Sanger will stay. The willingness to distort history is a testimony to the hold that the sexual revolution has over elite opinion. As my colleague John Stonetreet put it, “Much better people have been removed from hero status after doing far more good and far less evil than [Sanger]. But a nation that provides abortion pills to 12-year-olds over the counter without a prescription is pre-committed to Sanger’s legacy despite the facts.”

It’s a pre-commitment that can be blinding. Even inside a carefully-lit museum.


This article was originally posted at Breakpoint.org.

 




The Culture of Death Says Life Begins at Delivery

Cecile Richards is no stranger to controversy. As the president of Planned Parenthood she leads one of the central institutions of the Culture of Death — an organization that was born in the dark vision of Margaret Sanger and now exists as the nation’s most visible promoter and provider of abortion. Cecile Richards has been an ardent defender of a woman’s “right” to abort her baby at any time for any reason. She also believes that women should be able to abort their babies for free, with taxpayers footing the bill.

Her support of abortion for any reason and for any stage of fetal development — including the most barbarous partial-birth abortions — was explained, perhaps accidentally, in an interview she recently gave to Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV. When Ramos asked Richards when life begins, she said: “It’s not something I really feel like is really part of this conversation … every woman needs to make their own decision.”

Her non-answer to one of the most fundamental questions of human dignity was shocking enough, but there was more to come. As it turns out, Richards does have a belief  about when life begins.

Ramos was apparently surprised by her evasion of the question and asked, “Why would it be controversial for you to say when you think life starts?”

Richards offered another non-answer: “I don’t know that it’s controversial. I don’t know that it’s really relevant to the conversation.”

Seriously? When the conversation is about abortion?

Then she dropped the bombshell:

“For me, I’m the mother of three children. For me, life began when I delivered them. They’ve been probably the most important thing in my life ever since. But that was my own personal decision.”

So life begins at delivery. Until then, no life, no dignity, no sanctity at all. This defies any moral sense, but it also defies modern biology. Cecile Richards did not try to argue the now infamous trimester argument of Roe v. Wade or a point of viability or any other argument about fetal development. As her comment makes clear, in her worldview the fetus doesn’t matter at all.

She identified her three children as “probably the most important thing in my life” since their delivery. Were they nothing to her in her womb? Each of those three precious children was precious in the womb — at every point of development.

Candid admissions of a worldview like this one are rare, but Cecile Richards’ statement perfectly explains her advocacy of abortion at any time for any reason. In her interview the Culture of Death bares its teeth.


This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com blog.




Abortion and the American Conscience

America has been at war over abortion for the last four decades and more. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, the court’s majority attempted to put an end to the abortion question. To the contrary, that decision both enlarged and revealed the great moral divide that runs through the center of our culture.

Most Americans seem completely unaware of the actual contours of the abortion debate as it emerged in the early 1970s. In 1973, the primary opposition to abortion on demand came from the Roman Catholic Church. Evangelicals — representative of the larger American culture — were largely out of the debate. At that time, a majority of evangelicals seemed to see abortion as a largely Catholic issue. It took the shock of Roe v. Wade and the reality of abortion on demand to awaken the Evangelical conscience.

Roe v. Wade was championed as one of the great victories achieved by the feminist movement. The leaders of that movement claimed — and continue to claim — that the availability of abortion on demand is necessary in order for women to be equal with men with respect to the absence of pregnancy as an obstacle to career advancement. Furthermore, the moral logic of Roe v. Wade was a thunderous affirmation of the ideal of personal autonomy that had already taken hold of the American mind. As the decision made all too clear, rights talk had displaced what had been seen as the higher concern of right versus wrong.

Also missing from our contemporary cultural memory is the fact that many Republicans, as well as Democrats, welcomed Roe v. Wade as the next step in a necessary process of liberating human beings from prior constraints. Yet, we now know that even more was at stake.

Tapes recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library reveal that President Richard M. Nixon, who had been considered generally opposed to abortion, told aides on January 23, 1973 (the day after the decision was handed down) that abortion was justified in certain cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” said Nixon. President Nixon’s words, chilling as they are, are also a general reflection of the moral logic shared by millions of Americans in that day.

As a matter of fact, one of the dirty secrets of the abortion rights movement is that its earliest momentum was driven by a concern that was deeply racial. Leaders such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued quite openly that abortion and other means of birth control were necessary in order to limit the number of undesirable children. As she made clear, the least desirable children were those born to certain ethnically and racially defined families. Sanger, along with so many other “progressive” figures of the day, promoted the agenda of the eugenics movement — more children from the “fit” and less from the “unfit.”

President Nixon, speaking off-the-cuff about the Roe v. Wade decision handed down just the day before, did register his concern that the open availability of abortion would lead to sexual permissiveness and a further breakdown of the family. Nevertheless, he carefully carved out an exception for interracial pregnancies.

Nixon’s comment, made almost 40 years ago, was strangely and creepily echoed in comments made by Supreme Court associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In an interview published in The New York Times Magazine, Justice Ginsburg made her absolute support of abortion on demand unconditionally clear. She tied her support for abortion to the larger feminist agenda and lamented the passage of the Hyde Amendment which excludes the use of Medicaid for abortions. The Supreme Court upheld the Hyde amendment in 1980, surprising Ginsburg, who commented:

“Frankly I had thought at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.”

Justice Ginsburg’s comments were made in the context of comments about her hopes for feminism and her anticipation of being joined at the court by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then about to begin confirmation hearings. The larger context of Justice Ginsburg’s comments do not provide much assistance in understanding whether she was speaking of her own personal convictions or describing what was being thought by others at the time.

Of greatest importance is the fact that Justice Ginsburg’s comments reveal the racial, economic, and ethnic discrimination that was at the very heart of the push for abortion on demand throughout much of the 20th century. Also revealed is Justice Ginsburg’s virtually unrestricted support for a woman’s right to an abortion. In the interview, she goes so far as to lament the fact that the language of Roe v. Wade mentioned abortion is a decision made by the woman and her physician. As Justice Ginsburg told The New York Times, “So the view you get is the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him.”

The American conscience remains deeply divided over the question of abortion. Tragically, we have never experienced a sustained, reasonable, and honest discussion about abortion in the society at large. One step toward the recovery of an ethic of life would be an honest discussion about the actual agenda behind the push for abortion on demand. Proponents of abortion rights do everything they can to hide the ugliness of the agenda behind the comments made by President Nixon and Justice Ginsburg.  Nevertheless, the truth has a way of working itself into view.

Just take a good look at the comments made by the late President and the current Justice. Furthermore, ask yourself why there is such racial disparity in abortion. Those comments turn more chilling by the day.




The Birth Control Pill – Gateway Drug to Liberalism

Watching Rick Santorum during the Arizona debate reminded me of my trips to the grocery store with my eight children in tow. Having a large, Catholic family in today’s liberal, sexually revolutionized world makes you a target for evangelization by the Left. While shopping, I am stopped several times by people who want to know if they are all mine, are part of a daycare, or if they are all from the same father. That last question is my favorite. The inquisition usually ends with cute, didactic comments like “You know there are ways of preventing that.” or, “Maybe you should tell your husband to get a hobby.” It’s always great to have your sex life examined by smug, pseudo intellectual strangers in front of your children. I’ve thought about carrying around a resume with my B.A. degree colored over in yellow highlighter to prove that I’m not a total idiot — but I wouldn’t want to seem rude.

 Santorum has been drug into a similar situation. He is being portrayed as a Neanderthal, Taliban wannabe, hell bent on ripping birth control away from poor, oppressed women across the globe. The insinuation is that without the birth control pill, women everywhere would be forced to bear countless children while chained to their ovens.  Birth control believers, now whipped into a stiff peak frenzy, are rendered incapable of hearing any other position put forth by Santorum.  He is a heretic.  He has denied the Left’s belief in the Sacrament of Birth Control.  He has sinned against Women’s Health and the Commandments of their collective Rights.

 The conclusion is that the sexual revolution was the greatest victory ever won by women and right minded men. Let’s examine the facts. The birth control pill was the brain child and fondest wish of Planned Parenthood’s racist founder, Margaret Sanger. She wanted to find a “magic pill” that had the power to make parasitic babies go away. Due to her belief in eugenics, what she wanted most was to prevent the proliferation of  black babies but realized how controversial this would be to the American public. Proof of this secret “plan” is revealed in a letter that she wrote Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune, in December of 1939.

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea 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. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.)

Margaret’s dream of a magic pill eluded her until she met Dr. Gregory Pincus. He was referred to as “Dr. Frankenstein” because of his successful in-vitro fertilization experiments on rabbits. He was vilified for making some of the nightmare science fiction scenarios imagined in “Brave New World”  a scientific reality. Sanger procured funding for Pincus to begin development of the pill.  In 1956, the birth control pill, under the name Enovid, was submitted for trials.

 By 1964, a quarter of all American couples were using the pill. Today, according to the CDC, 98 percent of women of childbearing age use birth control with 64 percent choosing the pill. While these statistics come as no shock to most, there is some lesser known information about the pill that might. Did you know that the pill prevents pregnancy in three ways? According to  The Physician’s Desk Reference, hormonal contraceptives:

  • Prevent ovulation.

  • Thicken the cervical mucus to prevent sperm from entering the uterus and fallopian tube.

  • Alter the lining of the uterus so implantation cannot take place. The third action, if and when it occurs, is abortifacient (meaning a human life has begun but cannot continue to develop without the nourishment provided through the mother’s uterine wall). 

Yes Virginia, the birth control pill IS an abortifacient. How many unsuspecting women realize that by using the birth control pill they have not only been preventing pregnancy but aborting unknown numbers of their developing babies?

If this bit of information is not enough to rouse your concern, how about the fact that the birth control pill is listed by the World Health Organization as a class one carcinogen.  Moreover, an article titled, Birth Control Leading Carcinogen by J. Benkovic, exposes the fact that the pill is linked to a 660 percent increase in breast cancer. Wow, do you think that the Susan G. Komen Foundation knows about this? Let’s all take a moment to engage in some facetious wondering.

Why is there a blackout of information regarding the truth about the pill? Could it be that the proponents of birth control care less about “women’s health” and more about population control or dare I say it…control in general? The collective “We” seem to be slipping back into a central controlled master/servant class. Albeit today it is less about the haves and have-nots and more about the know-it-alls and the know-nothings. The pill, which promised freedom and equality to women, has proven to be the gateway drug leading to progressive Liberalism.

The Catholic Church had it right when it spoke out against artificial birth control in the 1968 Papal Encyclical titled “Humanae Vitae”.  An article from Business Insider titled Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control summarizes the issue best.  Authors Micheal Dougherty and Pascal Gobry wrote the following on the Pope Paul VI ‘s warnings.  He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

  1. General lowering of moral standards
  2. A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
  3. The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men. 
  4. Government coercion in reproductive matters. 

Does that sound familiar? 

Because it sure sounds like what’s been happening for the past 40 years. 

Planned Parenthood has expanded from a birth control provider into the nation’s largest abortion provider. The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform reports that approximately 3,700 abortions are performed in America each day. This is an unbelievable holocaust and for what?  Are women really better off than they were before the pill? Is having a job outside of the home really superior to raising a family?

 The objective reality of the situation is that women are forced to spend a large portion of their salaries paying for twenty year old college girls to raise their kids at daycare. And guess what, most of these women, after working an eight hour shift at their dream job, still go home and clean and cook dinner anyway. Maybe they can go paint Tom Sawyers fence when they get some free time.

Rick Santorum is just one in a long list of politicians who have been crucified for daring to speak out on moral truths. Any candidate who adheres to basic moral norms is deemed things like “crazy”, “right wing” or “unelectable.” Remember Sarah Palin? How about Pat Buchanan? It is time to stop killing the messengers.

America, much like the Titanic, was once thought to be indestructible. Our ship is on a collision course with an  iceburg of fiscal and social problems charted by Liberal elites like Barak Obama and George Bush. As we head nearer to our destruction, the Progressive left has proven that the only means of salvation that they have to offer us is a sacramental birth control pill. There is still a chance to avoid catastrophe. We must acknowledge Liberalism as the real opiate of the people and throw it’s dealers overboard before we go down with them.