Planned Parenthood and the 'marketing of meaninglessness'

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

The message of my last book, "White Ghetto", is that the social chaos in inner city black communities is symptomatic of the cultural pathology gripping the nation as a whole.

Inner city black American life is a leading indicator of American culture and a product of the ascendance of materialism and relativism. Blacks have been first because they have been the most exposed and vulnerable.

When 20 percent of black babies were born to unwed mothers in the 1960s, this was sufficiently outside the national norm to be perceived as a uniquely black problem. But today, as the black rate has soared to 70 percent, the incidence of white out-of-wedlock births, now almost 1-in-3 three, exceeds the black incidence of 40 years ago.

The symptoms of social and cultural unraveling -- family breakdown, promiscuity, teen pregnancy, abortion -- are today increasingly manifested in white as well as black America.

Now, according to a lengthy profile in the Wall Street Journal, America's pre-eminent marketer of the culture of meaninglessness, Planned Parenthood, plans to help expedite this process and is retooling to go beyond targeting poor blacks to reach out to all Americans.

The article, "Extending the brand: Planned Parenthood Hits Suburbia," discusses how the organization is mobilizing its now-considerable resources -- a $1 billion dollar budget, with a reported $100 million-plus surplus -- to build glitzy new multimillion-dollar centers and express outlets in malls -- to reach women of means and everyone else.

Soon your daughter, too, can learn that the point of her life is her own pleasure and that other human beings, in or outside of the womb, are mere tools to be used toward that end. And, according to the organization's president, Cecile Richards, they want to reach young men as well as women.

What, after all, is our national specialty if not marketing? So, as Starbucks is to coffee, as Wal-Mart is to volume sales, so Planned Parenthood is to nihilism.

Until now, Planned Parenthood clinics have been strategically located in proximity to black neighborhoods and schools. But blacks only constitute 12 percent of the country. It makes all the business sense in the world for Planned Parenthood to move into the rapidly growing new Latino community and into mainstream white America.

Marketing itself under the happy face of providing "reproductive health" services, Planned Parenthood provides 1-of-5 abortions done in the country. Although the overall number of abortions performed each year has dropped, the percent done by Planned Parenthood has increased, translating in absolute numbers to almost 300,000 annually.

About one-third of abortions are black babies.

Let's be clear that the main goal of these abortion services is not to save lives of women whose life is in danger as result of their pregnancy. The objective is birth and population control.

In this sense, the organization has been true to the vision of its founder -- socialist, eugenicist, and racist, Margaret Sanger.

Sanger created the "Negro Project" in 1939 whose aim was to put a lid on the growth rate of the black population. She was an advocate of the use of sterilization as well as abortion to eliminate the "unfit."

Recent news about the teen pregnancy epidemic in Gloucester, Mass., has caused shock. More shocking was learning that the pregnancies were intentional. I'll add that further shock resulted from the girls being white.

A black teenager intentionally getting pregnant is not news.

Meaninglessness may be transmitted to brains but it does not get transmitted to bodies. As young black women, in the face of despair, have asserted life through pregnancy, we now see this happening with young white women.

Planned Parenthood gets one-third of its budget, over $300 million, from the federal government -- from U.S. taxpayers. This is the size of the budget of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Sixty thousand black children in failing inner city public schools, kids largely from broken families, could get $5,000 scholarships each to go to a private school, a religious school, and learn values that could give them a chance for a successful life.

Let's get out of the business of marketing meaninglessness and death. At least, let's stop forcing U.S. taxpayers to subsidize it.

Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.