This is where Planned Parenthood’s logic leads

You probably know Planned Parenthood as the biggest and most powerful abortion provider in America. But like all bottom-line focused businesses, Planned Parenthood is always looking for ways to expand the ideology of abortion. We just learned more about that ideology.

According to court documents, earlier this year, U.S. Marine Christopher Cooprider found out his neighbor had become pregnant with his child. According to text messages between the two, Cooprider was very, very scared of the little baby—just as Planned Parenthood told him he should be.   

“Parents have to give up a lot for their children,” the company, which depends on parents choosing to abort their children to make money, writes on its website under the heading “Am I Ready for a Baby?” They continue: “Meeting your child’s needs can be very challenging. People who are raising kids usually get less sleep and don’t have as much time to do things they need and want to do.”  

Mr. Cooprider, it seems, took that message right to heart. His text messages show that he tried—with increasing force—to convince the mother of his baby, Llana Davis, to have an abortion. When she refused, Cooprider allegedly obtained the abortion pill, put it into her hot chocolate, and tricked her into drinking it. When Davis began experiencing cramps and dangerously heavy bleeding and wanted to go to the hospital, Cooprider was nowhere to be found. (Maybe this was one of the “challenging needs” Planned Parenthood was talking about. Maybe Cooprider just needed some sleep!) 

In his defense, Planned Parenthood doesn’t seem to have much (or any) advice for new dads; particularly new dads who are too scared to have a baby. They definitely don’t have any advice for new dads who are too scared to have a baby but whose partner—the one who will carry the heaviest mental, physical, and emotional weight of the pregnancy and the first years of her baby’s life—isn’t.

Maybe their “advice” in such cases should be understood as written between the lines of their abortion-pill recommendations; which Cooprider—according to his text messages—seems to have studied intensely.  (Like any good spokesperson would!)

Before the alleged poisoning, when Cooprider was still trying to convince Davis to kill her baby herself, he texted her that the abortion pill  “Can be safely taken at home and without medical supervision. Without record.”  

When Davis told Cooprider she didn’t want to take the pills, he responded:  “It’s a safe and reliable 24-48 hour process. With minor setbacks like stomach pain, cramps, nausea, bleeding” 

Now, Cooprider is not quite as consistent with his punctuation as Planned Parenthood’s website. But the content and the messaging (these are marketing terms, in case you didn’t know) were spot on.

“Medication abortion is really safe and effective,” Planned Parenthood says on its website. “It’s a super common way to have an abortion, and millions of people have used it safely.” (You can trust PP here because they’re super cool and hip. Medication abortions aren’t just “common,” they’re “super common.”) 

Usually, a good spokesperson will also be well-versed in a product’s possible drawbacks—to prepare for possible criticism. This is Cooprider’s one flaw. He does not appear to have done any further study on the abortion pill beyond Planned Parenthood’s own cyber storefront. If he had, he might have found that one out of 11 women who take the abortion pill will experience a serious adverse medical reaction, such as hemorrhaging and sepsis. For roughly one in 19 women, the abortion pill won’t fully “work,” and they’ll require further intervention to “complete” the abortion. It is unclear as yet whether Planned Parenthood considers any of these a “minor setback.” 

Nevertheless, PP should be proud of their newest hype man. If the allegations against him are true, Christopher Cooprider took their talking points right to their logical conclusions. Sure, abortionists like to say they promote abortion because it supports “women’s autonomy.” But sometimes, women just don’t want to use their autonomy the right way! For example, sometimes women who enter a relationship with a coward and then unexpectedly become pregnant want to embrace the challenge and pain and to choose to mother their new baby into life. This is the wrong kind of autonomy! In fact, this is how most abortions go: roughly 70 percent of women who get an abortion report someone else pressured her. 

Planned Parenthood will never admit or condemn this reality, because it is a very lucrative, effective, and low-cost marketing strategy. It is unlikely Planned Parenthood would be stupid enough to publicly encourage anyone to trick a woman by putting dangerous chemicals into her hot chocolate to kill her baby. But the record now shows that even when that happens, like it allegedly just did in Texas, they will continue to call abortion a matter of autonomy. We should just remember that sometimes—most of the time, really—it is a matter of a man’s autonomy.

They probably won’t put that on the poster, though.