Rick Santorum and James Dobson are Dolts (Evil Planned Parenthood Nazis edition)

I don’t have the full transcript of today’s broadcast of Rick Santorum and Gary Brauer talking with James Dobson (Focus on the Family) about Planned Parenthood and their evil, evil ways. I just have this transcribed snippet from the show (courtesy of Right Wing Watch, which has the audio as well to match up).

(Note: Gary Brauer is probably, through association, a dolt, too … but he’s not quoted here.)

Dobson: We’re going to talk about Planned Parenthood today which has been in the news recently in scandals that reveal just how evil and how sinister this organization really is.

Hi, Dr Dobson.  Would these “recent scandals” be about the scam pulled by Lila Rose’s group Live Action, where they sent in people undercover posting as a pimp and an underage girl, trying to get the Planned Parenthood folks at the offices being visited to say incriminating or scandalous things? The scam that Planned Parenthood itself contacted the FBI about, concerned over a possible sex trafficking ring or else a hoax?

Santorum: They have been pushing their agenda for close to a hundred years.

Um, just like Bank of America has been “pushing their agenda” for over 100 years, or the Red Cross has been “pushing their agenda” for 150 years?

I mean, it goes all the way back to Margaret Sanger and her views on eugenics, of culling the race from inferiors, that started Planned Parenthood. This was a movement to try to purify the race and she was for abortion and sterilization and things to get to her aim of a eugenics movement in this country and it was, unfortunately, widely accepted in the early part of the last century. That, with what happened in Nazi Germany which, by the way, took a lot of their eugenics ideas from Margaret Sanger and from the American eugenics movement and applied them to the Jews and other quote “undesirables” in Nazi Germany.

Sanger! Eugenics! Nazis! Planned Parenthood! EEEEVVILLL!

Got history, Rick?  This is the standard libel against Margaret Sanger (and, by association, Planned Parenthood).  Here are some of the facts:

1. Sanger’s primary activism was for birth control and sex education as a means to free women (of all races) from unwanted pregnancy.
2. Sanger, ironically, opposed abortion on mostly moral grounds — indeed, she saw one of the benefits of family planning services and education as a reduction in the abortion rates that America had at the time (even while it was illegal).
3. Sanger did believe in eugenics in some fashion (it was a popular belief in the early 20th Century, peaking in the 20s and 30s, and was held by many other notables such as Alexander Graham Bell, Teddy Roosevelt, the National Academy of Sciences, quite a number of state legislatures, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, etc.). But “eugenics” meant many things to many people.  Sanger’s emphasis was on immigration reform and forced sterilization to keep the most feebleminded population of the United States as low as possible; she firmly rejected both race-based eugenics and euthanasia as a eugenic tool, and condemned the Nazi’s programs and prejudices long before the war. (Planned Parenthood, on its part, rejects Sanger’s eugenic positions.)

It’s a bit difficult to research Sanger through Google, given the rabid Santorumesque anti-abortion articles that vilify her.  Wikipedia and Planned Parenthood have good (and well-cited) overviews of her career and both her real controversial statements and those falsely attributed to her.

But Planned Parenthood is the offshoot, is the progeny of Sanger and this movement and it continues today as they set up their clinics and as they try to … again, if you look the statistics, target the minority community, the African American community where the abortion rates are much, much higher. This is no accident.

No, it’s no accident.  Planned Parenthood’s services (not just abortion, which is a tiny fraction of its business, but family planning and women’s health care) are more widely used among poorer Americans — which includes, disproportionately, African-Americans.

When a woman walks into an abortion clinic, she’s entitled to a dead baby and it doesn’t really matter how you do it – that’s where the abortion movement is moving.

I have no idea what that means. Nobody is “entitled to a dead baby” — but those who are “pro-choice” believe that the decision about whether to have an abortion or not is something that a woman, in consultation with her doctor, should decide — not a state legislator, a preacher, or a conservative talk radio host.

It’s worth repeating, by the way, something I noted a few paragraphs up.  Folks like Santorum and Dobson make Planned Parenthood out to be some sort of abortion factory, churning them out as fast as they can, gleefully twirling their mustachios at some shadowy master plan. In reality, 86% of PP health care is for birth control and family planning (35%), testing and treatment of STDs (34%), and cancer screening and prevention (17%). Another 10% is for other women’s health services.  Only 3% involves abortion — and none of that is paid for by federal tax dollars.  PP gets a third of its funding from government grants, the rest is from fees charged at clinics and from private donations.

So all that posturing for cutting federal grants to Planned Parenthood by the GOP in the House?  It’s not going to reduce abortions one iota.  They’re not funded by federal money.

What will it do instead?  It’s going to reduce birth control services (more unwanted pregnancies, likely more abortions), reduce STD testing and treatment (more deaths of both women and their babies), and it’s going to reduce cancer screening and prevention for women (and thus still more death).

Hardly a “culture of life” stand to be taking, Messrs. Dobson and Santorum.

Dolts.