Planned Parenthood in the United State has reported performing 327,654 abortions during the fiscal year of 2014. This amounts to 37 abortions per hour, or an average of slightly more than one abortion every two minutes. This figure exceeds the total number of abortions from the previous year by 487. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards considers this carnage as progress and warns that “politicians who are trying to erase women’s progress are on the wrong side of history.”
This is a most curious boast since, thanks to Planned Parenthood, 327,654 American souls now have no history. It is a boast that is more hysterical than historical. Moreover, it rests on a gross misunderstanding of history as well as an equally gross misunderstanding of life.
Cecile Richards claims that pro-lifers are on the “wrong side of history”
Edward Gibbon, whose monumental work, The History and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, established him as arguably the most important historian since Tacitus, had something to say about history. “History,” he wrote, “is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”. It is a view of history that was shared by Voltaire (“L’histoire n’est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs” (translated: “History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes”).
No doubt Caligula, Nero, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Marx, Hitler, and Stalin all thought that they were on the right side of history. Entire civilizations do fall. Progress is not measured by the number of lives that are snuffed out. Here, the words of Hubert H. Humphrey are worth repeating: “The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children, those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Planned Parenthood received $528.4 million from government grants and reimbursements last year, accounting for 41 percent of its revenue.
President Richards also claimed, in accordance with standard pro-abortion thinking, that abortion relieves a woman of the inconvenience of having a child and prevents her from capturing her true destiny. “For young women in America”, she stated, “the idea that pregnancy alone would determine their destiny is unthinkable today. They fully expect that birth control and safe and legal abortion will be available to them, and they should.” The destinies of all those females who were aborted must be sacrificed on the altar of progress. Progress, one might think, should be kinder to all of its citizenry.
In a 1994 lecture at Hillsdale College, Margaret Thatcher, who also knew something about history, delivered the following words to her audience: “[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenian’s dire fate when we confront demands for increased state paternalism.”
If we are to figure out who is on the right side of history and we look to history for our answer, it is the stout hearted people who unselfishly defend and promote life, and have a stronger abiding belief in the capacities of the human spirit than in the beneficence of the government. The United States government is clearly urging and abetting Planned Parenthood to assume the forefront on the wrong side of history.
“History,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper, “like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.” We can say that Planned Parenthood’s self-constructed bright halo is, indeed, purely imaginary.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
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