Will Planned Parenthood keep its killing fields?

Ross Douthat continues to be a one-man voice of sanity amid the babble of The New York Times. Please take a look at this piece of his published yesterday, “There Is No Pro-Life Case for Planned Parenthood.” And if you want to learn more about Douthat’s thinking, read WORLD’s interviews with him published in 2008 and 2012.

Yesterday, Douthat cut to shreds the weird but popular (among abortion-backers) claim that anyone who thinks about the hundreds of thousands of abortions Planned Parenthood performs each year and then says Washington should not send hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to the organization each year is objectively pro-abortion.

Say what? Yes, pundits like Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, Will Saletan of Slate, and others say federal funding of Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive pushing keeps many children from being conceived and then aborted. On the surface (unless we’re concerned about the morality of sex outside marriage, and few august columnists are) that argument could make sense—but facts get in the way.

Douthat lays them out: lack of evidence for any correlation between liberal social policies and lower abortion rates, and recent reductions in federal funding have tracked alongside a sharp decline in abortion. That could just be coincidence, but Douthat points out that “the case for a strictly contraceptive approach to reducing the abortion rate is not strong enough, not nearly strong enough, not anywhere close to strong enough to justify the kind of moral blackmail that moderate liberals keep trying to deploy against pro-lifers to keep money flowing to the nation’s largest purveyor of abortion.”

Remember, we are talking about the dismemberment of living human beings here, so even if evidence for the Planned Parenthood defense did exist, Douthat’s last sentence is strong: “Don’t bring your worldview’s bloody hands to me and demand my dollars to pay for soap enough to maybe wash a few flecks off.”

As long as Democratic legislators and President Barack Obama don’t mind having bloody hands, taxpayer dollars will continue to fund Planned Parenthood’s killing fields. The immediate question is whether Planned Parenthood will continue to get corporate money—several companies are washing their hands—and support from public charities like Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Thanks to Komen’s association with Planned Parenthood, its fight against breast cancer has already lost millions in annual revenues, and these new revelations will make Komen’s continued association with Planned Parenthood even harder to justify—especially since Komen’s dollars could have much more impact if they went to numerous alternative programs that do breast cancer screening and don’t kill the babies whom breasts could nourish.