by Dan Weaver

Created on: February 17, 2008

While the religious right was protesting abortion on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on January 22, 2008, the religious left was praying over and blessing the new Planned Parenthood Mohawk Hudson (PPMH) facility in Schenectady, New York. What kind of prayers does one say over a building where mothers go to have their unborn children sliced, diced, salined and hoovered out of their wombs? All I could think of was a perverse rendering of the "Hail Mary." Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the defruiting of thy womb.

I couldn't help but think how hypocritical it was for the religious left to pray over an abortion clinic, for a number of reasons. For example, the religious left is generally against profit and big business. Nevertheless, PPMH while technically non-profit, is very profitable. According to PPMH's 2006 tax return (the latest return I could get my hands on), PPMH took in over twelve million dollars in 2005 and had almost seven million in net assets at the end of the year. In 2005 PPMH paid twenty-eight employees more than $50,000 a year. I wonder how many businesses in Schenectady with the same revenue as PPMH can afford to pay $50,000-$150,000 a year to so many employees?

Nor do the prophets of the left see any inconsistency in blessing an organization that owns more than $250,000 worth of stocks in corporations like IBM, Merck and Pfizer. In 2005 PPMH's conscience did not twinge when it accepted and sold 195 shares of Halliburton, the number one Iraqi war profiteer and 768 shares of Exxon-Mobil stock, even though the Center For Corporate Policy in Washington DC claims that Exxon-Mobil is one of the ten top profiteers from the war in Iraq. PPMH also accepted and sold 4504 shares of GE which profits from the war through Department of Defense contracts.

You would think too that the religious left would save its blessings for truly charitable organizations. PPMH's tax return reveals that it spent a miserly $13,086 on charity in 2005. That was the amount spent on patient assistance. Planned Parenthood is not the great lover of the poor as people think. Most of its services are paid for by its clients, insurance companies and our tax dollars. In 2005, PPMH collected more than 6.5 million dollars from its clients and their insurance companies. It collected another four million dollars plus, from the government.

Planned Parenthood as well as other abortion providers are not interested in service. They are interested in profit. PPMH is only one of hundreds of franchises of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the national organization, took in over sixty million dollars in 2005. It had net assets at the end of the year of almost forty million dollars. It had 320 employees with almost 200 of them making more than $50,000 a year, some making upwards of $300,000 a year.

To say that abortion providers are oriented toward service, one must first believe that abortion is a service. That is debatable. The fact that abortion providers are oriented toward profit is not debatable. Planned Parenthood's own tax returns show that.

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