In a recent social media post, new Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen asserted that the organization’s services, which include the provision of contraceptives and abortions, are “standard medical care,” and healthcare is a “basic human right.”
“From here on out, we want to be clear: Planned Parenthood services, from birth control to cancer screenings and abortion, are standard medical care,” she wrote on Dec. 16. “Reproductive healthcare is healthcare. Women’s healthcare is healthcare. And healthcare is a basic human right. #ThisIsHealthcare”
The following day, Wen tweeted, “Denying people healthcare perpetuates inequality. Keeping people unhealthy is a tool of oppression. The American people want more healthcare, not less. We want healthcare protected, expanded, and treated as a fundamental human right. #ThisIsHealthcare”
While Wen’s remarks generated thousands of likes, a number of others decided to refute her claims.
“Abortion is not standard healthcare. It’s an elective procedure that stops a healthy, normal biological process and ends a human life. Ending life is never healthcare,” one commenter wrote.
“Ending the lives of the most innocent and vulnerable among us is not healthcare; it’s murder,” another stated.
“Abortion is the intentional killing of the living individual in utero. It is an attack on health and life. It is literally the opposite of healthcare. This is reality. You continue with this ridiculous lie. For the baby it’s not healthcare—its deathcare!” a third declared.
“Cancer care is not in the same category of abortion,” another lamented. “My treatment was to help me live, abortion kills a child & often leaves the mother with mental & physical issues. Let me be clear, abortion is not healthcare; cancer care is healthcare. With that mindset, you’re not fit to be a doctor.”
Wen, 35, previously served as the health commissioner for the City of Baltimore, Maryland. As a physician, she worked in the emergency departments of Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as George Washington University Hospital.
In September, she was selected to succeed Planned Parenthood Foundation of America President Cecile Richards, who announced her resignation in January.
As previously reported, while modern-day Planned Parenthood leaders ardently argue that abortion is a mother’s “right,” the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, actually wrote against abortion, stating that “the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
“The great majority of women, however, belong to the working class. Nearly all of these women will fall into one of two general groups—the ones who are having children against their wills, and those who, to escape this evil, find refuge in abortion. Being given their choice by society—to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist,” she wrote.
However, Sanger’s solution to countering abortion was birth control, initially naming her organization the American Birth Control League. She decried large families, writing in a chapter of her book “Woman and the New Race”, “The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children.” She claimed that children get lost in large families and end up in jail or as prostitutes.
Sanger was also an advocate of eugenics against the disabled, as she made a correlation between birth control and the purification of the races. She also called for the sterilization of women in the “moron class.”
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives,” Sanger wrote. “If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.”