Posts tagged ‘Peter Singer’
Abortion as Big Business
Whenever the curtains are pulled back on Planned Parenthood clinics, the results never seem to turn out well. Through an interview with two former Planned Parenthood employees, it was discovered a clinic in Storm Lake, Iowa had abortion quotas. Sue Thayer, a former manager at Planned Parenthood, revealed:
Every center had a goal for how many abortions were done. And centers that didn’t do abortions like mine that were family planning clinics had a goal for the number of abortion referrals. And it was on this big grid, and if we hit our goal, our line was green. If we were 5 percent under, it was yellow. If we were 10 percent under, it was red. That’s when we needed to have a corrective action plan – why we didn’t hit the goal, what we’re going to do differently next time.
Planned Parenthood, for all the assertions it makes about helping people with family planning, seems to be primarily interested in selling one service – abortions. Mrs. Thayer went on to disclose some of the techniques her clinic would use to sell abortions:
I trained my staff the way that I was trained, which was to really encourage women to choose abortion, to have it at Planned Parenthood, because that counts as, you know, towards our goal. We would try to get the appointment scheduled for the abortion before they left our clinic. We would say things like, “Your pregnancy test, your visit today is X number of dollars. How much are you going to be able to pay towards that?” If they’d say, “I’m not able to pay today,” then we would say something like, “Well, if you can’t pay ten dollars today, how are you going to take care of a baby? Have you priced diapers? Do you know how much it costs to buy a car seat? … So really, don’t you think your smartest choice is termination?”
Honestly, this kind of sales pitch and posturing is difficult for me to process. Planned Parenthood workers freely admitted in their conversations that a life in a womb is – or, at the very least, will be – a baby who will need to be cared for and fed and protected, and yet, because of the expenses involved in raising a child, there is a cold calculation at work that says it is better to abort a child than to financially invest in one. I’m honestly not sure how else I’m supposed to interpret a calculation like this than this: for Planned Parenthood, financial burden trumps human life.
But it goes beyond that. For Planned Parenthood, financial gain also trumps human life. For those clinics that reached their abortion quotas, Mrs. Thayer explained:
We would have things like pizza parties. Occasionally, they would say, “You can two hours of paid time off.” If your center consistently hit goal and you were green all the time, you know, like, three months in a row, you might be center manager of the month and go to Des Moines and have lunch, you know, with the upper management, or something … It sounds kind of crazy, but pizza is a motivator.
Planned Parenthood is so devoted to selling abortions that they offer pizza parties as an incentive to their clinics to sell a lot of them. It turns out that they also hand out awards to clinics that increase the number of abortions they perform year over year.
The moral questions such practices raise are inescapable. Are the lives of babies who are born into lower financial means more disposable than the lives of babies who are born into more affluent families? Should the future of a life be subject to a financial litmus test – if a life can be afforded, it should be nurtured, and if it cannot, it should be ended? Should expectant mothers, who often have nagging doubts and deep moral misgivings about whether or not they should have an abortion, be pressured into a procedure to add to a company’s bottom line?
Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics chair at Princeton, has been widely decried, and rightly so, for his crassly utilitarian view of human life. He has claimed, for instance, “that a human’s life is not necessarily more sacred than a dog’s, and that it might be more compassionate to carry out medical experiments on hopelessly disabled, unconscious orphans than on perfectly healthy rats.” For Singer, the worth of a life can be coolly calculated by a set of criteria. If a life meets the criteria, it should be nurtured and protected. If it does not, it can be ended, even if it is a human life. It is difficult to see how Planned Parenthood’s financial criteria to determine a human life’s value differs all that much from Professor Singer’s method.
It must be said that a Christian cannot endorse or endure such a view of human life. Human life is not valuable because it meets certain criteria. It is valuable, according to Scripture, because of its origin and its unique reflection of its Creator. Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, echoes this sentiment using a Constitutional lens when he writes:
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws to all persons; this guarantee is replicated in Article 14 of the European Convention and in the constitutions and declarations of rights of many other countries. This profound social and political commitment to human equality is grounded on, and an expression of, the belief that all persons innately have dignity and are worthy of respect without regard to their perceived value based on some instrumental scale of usefulness or merit. We treat people as worthy of equal respect because of their status as human beings and without regard to their looks, gender, race, creed, or any other incidental trait – because, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, we hold it as ‘self-evident’ that ‘all men (and women) are created equal’ and enjoy ‘certain unalienable Rights,’ and ‘that among these are Life.’
What is “self-evident” to the framers of the Declaration of Independence is apparently not so self-evident to Planned Parenthood. May we never allow the inherent value of human life to be anything less than self-evident to us.
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