president obama's planned parenthood address

7/27/2019 President Obama's Planned Parenthood Address

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President Obamas Planned Parenthood

Address: Part I

By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

One in five women in this country has turned to Planned Parenthood for health care. One infive. (Applause.) And for many Planned Parenthood is their primary source of health carenot

just for contraceptive care, but for lifesaving preventive care, like cancer screenings and health

counseling.

President Obama to Planned Parenthood Convention, April 26, 2013

They (Christians) play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens.Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a

foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them.

Epistle to Diognetus, 2d Century A.D.

The morning after President Obama gave his bemused lecture to an enthusiastic Planned

Parenthood Convention in Washington, a friend of mine wrote to me. This man is experienced in

political things and a man of good sense. He stated that this address to the Planned Parenthood

Convention was the most evil speech ever delivered by a sitting American president. At thetime, I had not yet heard or read the speech.

But one can hardly not be curious about why a good man would call this speech simply evil.

What was his exact point?

One other item has been striking to me in recent

years. It is the number of people from various angles of life who have spontaneously wondered
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about the similarity of the president to the anti-hero in Robert Hugh Bensons 1913 novel, The

Lord of the World.

The similarity is not just in the sudden rise of an obscure American senator to the highest ofearthly powers, but in the agenda that he advocated in reaching it. The Benson novel falls into

the tradition of HuxleysBrave New Worldand Orwells 1984 with its systematic effort not toname things what they really are so that we are never faced with what we are actually doing.

Be that as it may, I read President Obamas upbeat urgings that the Planned Parenthood ladiesget into the fight against those backward, out-of-date types who would work against the

womans right to choose. The latter is a phrase that comes up suspiciously often in the address.

It lingers in our minds because we know that it really means something else than what the wordsspecifically indicate.

The presidents speech was full of warmth and affection. The head of Planned Parenthood was

addressed by her first name, Cecile. Mr. Obama said that the effusive welcome there made him

blush. Someone in the audience called out, I love you. The president responded: I love youback.

At the end, President Obama thanked Planned Parenthood, after telling them that the President

is going to be right there with you fighting every step of the way. He even asked God to bless

them, presumably for their good works. What Planned Parenthood is set up to do is to killhuman babies on a massive scale. It is difficult to imagine why such a request of God is not, in

fact, blasphemous.

Human life begins at conception. At any pre-natal stage what is at stake is an already begun

human life. Most commentators on this address have remarked that the president was scrupulous

never to pronounce the word abortion, as if that service were not an essential part of thePlanned Parenthood agenda.

In Planned Parenthood clinics, over 300,000 abortions are performed per year. The vague

phrases reproductive services along with right to choose are preferred over using the wordabortion. The reason for this preference is a clue to why the presidents speech might be

considered evil.

The service provided is the elimination of a child. The presidents address studiously contains

no mention of what it is that is in fact eliminated when the services are provided, usually withgovernment funding.

If the President has no problem with the rightness of the deed, why would he not want to use the

proper word, abortion, to describe that deed?

The further question is this: Why would a reasonable man consider this friendly PlannedParenthood address to be the most evil address ever given by an American president? The first

approach to this consideration is, I think, grammatical. The oft-repeated phrase right to choose,


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which is said to underpin the whole rationale of abortion without mentioning its name, does not,

in itself, really tell us anything about what is going on. That is why the phrase is used.

Let us suppose I spoke of a right to hear or a right to eat. Hearing, eating, and choosing arepowers found in certain living beings. The fact that I have a power that enables me to hear, eat,

or choose tells me nothing about what I hear, eat, or choose. I did not give myself these powers.They come with the kind of being I am. To say that I have a right to choose means only that I

have, as part of my being, a free will, a faculty. It says nothing about what I do with this freewill.

What I do with my choice or free will is the whole issue here. These capacities belong to what I

am. Does my right to eat mean that I may eat poison? The capacity of eating may be abused bydeliberately eating poison. We usually call it suicide. But the capacity itself enables us to eat

what we need for our well-being. The capacity does not mean that we may eat whatever we

want, with no restrictions about what it is we eat and its relation to the kind of being we are.

We do not know anything about the so-called right to choose until we have put an object to theinfinitive. To choose what? It is a verb and needs an object. Until that object is stated, we do not

know what this right to choose means in practice.

The right to choose does not give me a right to choose to kill someone. All it does is to tell

me that I can kill someone if I choose. I have the power to do so, not any right, unless, likemany moderns, by right we only mean power. But if I so choose, I am responsible for the act

that, because it was a choice, came out of my freedom and power. What we have here, then, is

the deliberate use of bad or incomplete grammar to cover up what we are actually promoting.

In the context of the presidents speech, the right to choose is cagily used to avoid stating what

it is that, in every case, is chosen when this so-called right is exercised. The question is: Whydoes President Obama notwant to say this word? Evidently, it is not because he has any

problem with approving abortion itself or what it actually is. He does not deceive himself aboutwhat happens. He just does not want everyone to know what he is doing. Hence words are used

that obscure what is happening, at least to those unwilling or unable to catch what is actually

meant by these words.

No one can doubt that President Obama knows what is chosen to happen when this right isexercised. A childs life is terminated in her mothers womb. By the judicious way he avoids

calling abortion what it is, the president implies that he does not want to name in public what it is

that happens when the choice is exercised. What can we conclude from these observations?

Plato often said that the worst thing that can happen to us is to have a lie in our soul about themost important things, to tell ourselves something is good when it is evil. Even though it takes

place in millions of instances yearly throughout the world, the fact is that objectively every

abortion is the killing of an already begin, innocent human life. In using the phrase right tochoose, we never simply talk of the womans right as if it had no object chosen.


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The child about to be aborted has a prior claim to be protected and cared for. That is implied in

the begetting itself and that to which a womans (and mans) being is directed. We cannot

separate the two by stressing only a natural faculty (power of choice) and not the complete actthat results in another actual human being.

The direct consequence in every instance of the exercise of the right to choose is the killing ofa begotten human child. It is clear that the right to choose really means freedom to kill the

human child. No wonder no one wants to speak what it is. But if we wont admit in public whatwe do, we must latch on to words that obscure, confuse, or deny what we do and know that we

do.

Read Part II of this article.

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., taught political science at Georgetown University

for many years. His latest book, The Mind That Is Catholic, is published by Catholic Universityof America Press. His forthcoming bookRemembering Belloc will be available from St.

Augustine Press in the spring of 2013.

Articles by Fr. Schall:

On the Dignity of Human Life

President Obamas Planned Parenthood Address: Part II

President Obamas Planned Parenthood Address: Part I

What is Man?

President Obamas Planned Parenthood

Address: Part II

By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
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Read Part I of this article here.

Whenever President Obama spoke in his recent address to Planned Parenthood about the

principal activities of their organization, he talked about dealing with contraceptive services.Now let it be stated that, if all that the Planned Parenthood organization were doing was

searching to cure diseases in women, like cancer, we would all be delighted to join them. Many

other organizations exist for the purpose of treating medical issues that do not imply abortion intheir work.

When the president includes a good or neutral activity along with the evil (albeit unnamed), he

wants us to believe that both were in the same acceptable moral category. Who would want to be

against helping women with cancer?

Here, however, we are asked to believe that finding cancer is equivalent to having an abortion.

But pregnancy is not a sickness, while cancer is. We are meant, by the presidents rhetoric, to

glide over these two different things as if they are the same worthy moral act. This is a deception.

It seeks to puts a lie in our souls about what is.

President Obama, in his lecture, ridicules stateslike Mississippi and North Dakota for their efforts to limit abortion. He implies that these efforts

are wrong because they are out-of-date. This is his argument: So the fact is, after decades of

progress, theres [sic] still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the1950s, than in the 21st century When you read about some of these laws, you want to check

the calendar, you want to make sure you are still living in 2013. The criterion of truth here

seems to be chronology, based on progress, which is always what we do now.

The president, to be sure, does not always eschew the language of right and wrong. Forty-twostates have introduced laws that would ban or severely limit access to a womans right to

choose. He calls the North Dakota and Mississippi initiatives to restrict abortion (i.e. womansright to choose) absurd and wrong.

If it is wrong or absurd to seek to limit or ban abortion, then what the president is doing mustbe right, namely fostering and providing facilities for abortion. Gods Thou shalt not kill now

means Thou shalt kill certain designated groups according to the time or year in which they

live. It is evil to say of what is right that it is wrong, and of what is wrong that it is right. Themore subtly we do this, the more effective.
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With regard to whether something is right or wrong because of the time in which it was enacted,

we recall Chestertons comment about those who say something can be right in one century but

wrong in another. Its like saying something can be right on Tuesday but wrong onWednesday. It is striking that President Obamas logic would allow him to invoke such a

dubious chronological principle to justify what he wants.

Moreover, as Robert Reilly pointed out, if we go back not to the 1950s, but a hundred years ago

to the founding of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sangers influence, the whole impetus ofthat organization was based on Darwinian eugenics. It was to weed out inferior races by

preventing them from breeding. With this background, the presidents own genetic origins would

have been the object of Planned Parenthood concern.

Whether a thing is right or wrong does not depend on the time in which it appears but on the

truthon the validity of the argument that establishes it.

What the president evidently calls wrong is anything that disagrees with his own conception of

what the law, in the service of his ideology, can do. But by his own chronological logic, if statesfinally succeed in limiting or forbidding abortion, since that would take place after the time when

it was available to everyone, it should be accepted as up-to-date, and the abortion position as

outdated.

Mr. Obama is a clever rhetorician but not a careful thinker. Hitler and Stalin were once up-to-date. One needs more than chronology to challenge them. Perhaps this is the reason the

Declaration of Independence was not cited during the Planned Parenthood meeting.

The final point that needs to be made concerns the starting point of the so-called right to

choose rhetoric. What should govern this whole question is not the woman or the man but the

child. Neither a woman nor a man by him or herself has any right to choose to have or nothave a child. What they have is a freedom to marry. If a child is begotten of them in this

relationship, it is their duty to bring it to birth and care for it in a home.

A child is always a gift, not a right, nor the product of a contract or a scientific process. Theprimary focus is the child, not the parent. The logic works in exactly the opposite manner from

the way we insist on thinking of children. Every child thus has the right to have both a mother

and a father (not one mother or one father or two mother s or two fathers) bound together in anexclusive relationship in which the family is formed. We should be speaking not of a womans

right to choose but of a man and a womans duty to accept and care for what they beget as a

gift in their personal relationship. This arrangement is what is best and normative for the child

and its parents and the society in which they live. When this principle is violated, everything inthe society itself begins to unravel.

Thus, in answer to the initial query, Why was this the most evil speech of an American

president?, in my opinion, it is because the speech systematically lies to us about what is reallyhappening when the right to choose or contraceptive services are put into practice.
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What is Man?
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president obama's planned parenthood address

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