Texas pro-lifers won big in late December when Texas Judge Gary Harger ruled that Texas can indeed exclude abortion providers from money allocated under the Texas Women’s Health Program. Of course, the largest and most profitable of the abortion providers is Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood sued, first in federal courts and then in the state. The Perry administration has now won their effort to enforce already existing Texas law and thus administer TWHP money without including Planned Parenthood.

An Associated Press story out of Austin implied that this decision would leave thousands of poor women without family planning services. According the governor’s website, 2,500 providers qualify for the TWHP money; Planned Parenthood represents only 2 percent of those providers. Further, Gov. Perry says that 80 percent of women served by the program were served by providers other than Planned Parenthood. Those who disagree with Perry regarding public funding for Planned Parenthood do not disagree with him about cancer screening or even necessarily about contraception; they disagree with him about abortion.

Planned Parenthood is behind about 25 percent of abortions in the U.S. While they are quick to say that this only represents about 11 percent of their business, it also represents three times that percentage of their revenue. Abortion is a significant revenue stream for Planned Parenthood. In Texas, their clinics would qualify for health program funding if they were not so committed, maybe dependent, on abortion. And of course that is the rub for conservatives. No one is objecting to women’s health care or counseling about services other than abortion. And of course no one is trying to discriminate against poor women. Pro-life Texans, including the governor, do not consider elective abortion to be simply a matter of women’s health. Planned Parenthood represents pro-abortion America in behaving as though abortion is the cornerstone of women’s healthcare. Abortion is the sharp and nasty end of a basic disagreement between Planned Parenthood and any recognizable biblical worldview.

Darwinist from the start
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, has been a controversial figure since early in the 20th Century. She believed that pregnancy often enslaved women, burdened families, resulted in greater poverty, and weakened the human race when the wrong people produced children. She advocated sterilization, forced in some cases, and wider use of contraception for the “unfit.” Sanger’s views make sense in light of the Darwinist theory of mankind as a naturally evolving beast. If the beast is wise enough to help evolution along by selective breeding, why not? In her day, these ideas were far more controversial than they are today. Sanger’s views of sexuality, family, and the worth of human life have been reasonably extrapolated into today’s immoral, anti-family, and anti-life agenda supported by the organization she began.

Some have noted that a high percentage, as high as three-fourths, of Planned Parenthood clinics are located in poor or minority neighborhoods. Perhaps it’s racism but it needn’t be intentionally racist to be objectionable. This could also be the outgrowth of Margaret Sanger’s ideas about eugenics—that the poor, ignorant, and unfit should be encouraged to stop bearing children. Her intent was that these people should not become pregnant. In this day, the organization that is her legacy seems more intent that children should not be born, even if education and contraception have not prevented pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood does more abortions now than they did 10 years ago; they also provide other kinds of medical services to fewer clients. Contraceptive distribution goes up, but so does the rate of unwed motherhood. The number of STD tests have gone up, but so have the rates of infection. But the main item on the menu is abortion. This is intentional, it is convictional, and it is profitable. Regardless of whether today’s Planned Parenthood has the same motives as its founder, the result has been that a much higher percentage of poor and minority babies are being aborted. To accompany this sinister trend, the rate of single motherhood, rising in all populations, is especially high in some minority communities. Contraceptives, including contraceptive abortions, focused in minority neighborhoods have not lifted families out of poverty or made the lives of poor women and children something more grand. Sanger’s vision has been a failure insofar as she intended to improve either the bloodline or the circumstances of the most vulnerable.

What about “parenthood?”
Perhaps the name of America’s largest abortion franchise is anachronistic. We have to wonder how their advocates would make the case that Planned Parenthood is in favor of “parenthood.” Some affiliates have promised underage children, any of reproductive age, to provide contraceptives if their parents will not. A PP ad in a Dallas paper promised contraceptives to underage people whose parents were “too stupid” to provide it for them. Additionally, Planned Parenthood has consistently opposed legal initiatives to honor a parent’s right to approve or even be apprised of an abortion performed on an underage child.

Is there parenthood without children? Between the time that a child is born alive and the time that child reaches puberty, Planned Parenthood devotes almost none of its attention that way. The focus is overwhelmingly on keeping a child from being born; failing that, the attention turns to discouraging women from reproducing.

Either because they are leftists or because of a “fewer births” agenda, Planned Parenthood’s website teaches young people that homosexuality and gender bending are normal. Most Americans still think this is the province of morality. Most parents prefer to teach their own kids morality, but Planned Parenthood has joined the cultural drumbeat of normalizing alternative sexual behavior, teaching kids something more sophisticated than what they might get at home. It is consistent with their message but in at least two ways contrary to any supposed commitment to “parenthood.”

But surely Planned Parenthood would favor adoption. Children conceived to women who cannot support them can be “wanted children.” Who could disagree with that? Adoptive parents are parents too. In reality, there is little reason to think that Planned Parenthood recommends adoption to pregnant clients. Ninety-eight percent of Planned Parenthood services to pregnant women recorded in the organization’s 2009 report were abortions. In that year, they provided fewer than 1,000 adoption referrals, about one-fifth as many as they provided only two years earlier. For whatever reason, adoption referral is not a priority service to pregnant women at Planned Parenthood.

Abortion & healthcare intertwined
Much of the smoke surrounding Perry’s enforcement of Texas’ law against public funding for abortion providers confuses various services provided by Planned Parenthood. That’s understandable. It is confused at several Planned Parenthood affiliate locations. Last year, the Texas Alliance for Life documented and reported multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates where the clinic using TWHP funds was under the same roof, at the same physical address as the abortion clinic also offered by the affiliate. The “separate” facilities shared the same staff, utilities, and other shared costs. In some cases this mingling clearly violated Texas law, in others it arguably did. Counselors at one side of the facility would counsel clients by referring them to the abortion facility in the next room.

Some reporters may not know how difficult it is to fund one thing at a Planned Parenthood affiliate without funding the other. There is also no indication that Planned Parenthood is moving toward “other” health services for women rather than toward more abortions. Although abortion is clearly a convictional cause for Planned Parenthood and its supporters, it is clearly also a profitable one.

Conclusion
Planned Parenthood stands against the moral teachings of the Bible. If the Bible is against abortion, Planned Parenthood is against the Bible. If the Bible warns against sexual behavior before or outside of marriage, Planned Parenthood is against the Bible. If the Bible calls homosexual behavior destructive to those who practice it and their communities, Planned Parenthood disagrees with what the Bible says. If children are a blessing from the Lord, Planned Parenthood says another thing in every way they can.

A materialistic view of mankind leads one to believe that there are no spiritual aspects to the things that people do, or to the things we do to people. There is no God who speaks to the “oughtness” of an act or to the application of a technology. If we are free to improve humanity by sterilization, targeted contraception, or even abortion as a kind of “plan C” contraception, then there is no reason that individuals can’t decide for themselves how much inconvenience they will accept for the sake of another human being. Today that inconvenient person is often a child; tomorrow it could be those who haven’t been children for many years. It is the mentality that leads to race wars or genocide. The most murderous regimes in the history of mankind were/are materialist, atheistic, and not religious as some modern writers assert. The most murderous regimes in history reasonably extrapolated the founding principles of Planned Parenthood. These principles have taken the organization far beyond Margaret Sanger’s vision but they have not taken it off the course she set.

All of us would agree that some people are ill-equipped to raise a child because of age, financial or marital status, or for some other reason. That child, once conceived, is a person who can be used of God. We’ve heard stories of great people who rose from humble means, who overcame various handicaps, people of whom few would dare say, “She shouldn’t have been born.” A child may result from foolish behavior or even a tragic crime. The child is not the tragedy. The child is not the inconvenience. It is not the growth and birth of a child that causes misfortune or a degradation of our species. The observable correlation between the increase in public funding and the number of abortions done by our nation’s largest provider leads pro-life Texans to hope that a decrease in the funding Planned Parenthood receives in Texas this year will mean fewer abortions this year.

I had one of those really strange days several years ago. It’s the kind of day that changes you before you’ve really had time to process what is happening. It all began with a knock on my office door. As I opened it there stood my mother weeping like I had never seen before.

She came to visit Cherry and I during the summer. The church in which I was the senior pastor, the First Baptist Church in Allen, Okla., was in the middle of Vacation Bible School. Our first son Patrick was a few months old. She was there to help out during a busy week, and spend as much time with her grandson as possible.

“Mom,” I said, “what is wrong?” I really couldn’t imagine what had happened, or what was on her mind that would compel her to stand at my office door weeping uncontrollably. Having been a pastor for nearly 20 years now, I had seen this all too frequently. But this was my mother. “Had someone died?” I thought to myself. “Has there been an accident? Are my wife and son alright?”
“Son,” she cried, “I have something very important that I need to tell you.”

For the next hour or longer, I listened to a story that would change everything that I knew about myself, and even some of my core convictions. Although it has been over 20 years since we had this conversation, it is still etched in my memory like it happened a few moments ago. Here is what she said as she poured out her heart:

“When I was 15 and living in Jackson, Tenn., I had a boyfriend named Tommy. He was tall and handsome and a year older than me. One day he came over to the house and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. It wasn’t long before I realized he had been drinking. He took me to a remote location, stopped the vehicle and raped me.”

“I was so angry with him for hurting me. I hardly realized what he had done. I was young and naive. A young girl back in the 1960s didn’t know what young girls know today. I resolved in my heart that I would end our relationship and stay away from him.

“My mother and father had been going through a divorce at that time,” she stated. “Our family was torn apart. Mother was also very sick with breast cancer. A few months later she had surgery and I went to stay with my aunt and uncle in Cairo, Ill. While I was there I became sick, although I didn’t understand why. They took me to their doctor. After a brief examination I heard the news that changed my life.”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is young lady,” the doctor said. “You are pregnant.”

“Pregnant! How could I be pregnant? I began to cry and panic. Quickly, the doctor called the nurse to give me a shot that would calm me down. Then he began trying to reason with me.”

“No one has to know about this,” the doctor said soothingly. “You can have a normal life. You do not have to go back to Jackson and bear the shame of your condition. You do not have to miss your prom. Let me take care of this for you. Let me end this pregnancy.”

“With the kind of confidence that one achieves after having done the same thing many times, the physician walked over to the cabinets in the examination room and began removing some of the instruments from the shelves. Holding them in his hands he approached me in a manner as if to begin the procedure without my permission.”

At this point in her conversation with me on that day, I was in a daze. After 27 years with my mother, I realized that she was telling me the most personal secret in her life. This may also be hard for you as the reader to imagine, but I didn’t have a clue that she was talking about me. I had never even heard her mention the name “Tommy.” As a matter of fact, I believed that my biological father was a man named “Richard James Strasshoffer Sr.” He was the man for whom I had been named at birth. His name was on my birth certificate. Until her divorce from Richard when I was seven, and the subsequent adoption by my new father Damon Shupp, I bore the name “Richard James Strasshoffer Jr.” “Where is this story going,” I thought to myself as she continued.

“As the doctor drew near I heard a voice. I was not a Christian at the time, but there was no mistaking to whom that voice belonged. The voice was clear and commanding. It echoed in my head. ‘Stop him! This one belongs to me.’ I had never heard anything like that before,” she cried, “not in church, not in my prayers, nowhere. But it was the voice of God, without a doubt.”

“I removed myself to a corner of the room and curled up in a little ball. I cried. I told the doctor that I couldn’t do what he was suggesting. Clearly, he was frustrated if not angry at me. He called my aunt and uncle into the room for the purpose of persuading me to let him perform the abortion. I kept telling them “No!” I can’t make that decision without thinking about it and talking to my mother.”

With a soft and gentle look my mother looked inside me and said, “Son, that was you. I’ve always known that God had a special plan for you. That day at age 19 when you told me that God had called you into the ministry was no surprise to me. I always knew. I knew it before you were born. You belong to God and for his purposes.”

This was all beginning to make sense to me now. I had always wondered how Richard, the man I thought was my biological father, could have walked out of my life so easily—never calling, no surprise visit at graduation, no letters on my birthday, even allowing my name to be changed. I wasn’t his son. Questions spun through my mind faster than I could process them.

She continued to unfold this amazing story. “Shortly after that I left Jackson for North Carolina. I had met a friend of my brother who was a Marine over the Christmas holidays. He stayed at our house because he had been estranged from his family. When I called my brother and told him what had happened to me, he overheard the conversation and offered to marry me. I had just turned 16, but this seemed to be my only option to get out of Jackson and away from the young man who had raped me. So I left my childhood and my life behind, and married a man I hardly knew.”

“Son, I have been so embarrassed that I never told you this before. I have lived in fear that you would find out and be angry with me. I want you to know that I have always loved you and did everything within my power to protect you and give you all that you deserved.”

“Your real father died when you were 10. He was a pilot. The small plane he was flying crashed and was consumed by fire. I remember the day that the news came to me. I saw you playing by yourself that day. You were so happy, and I was extremely sad that you would never have a chance to meet him. Despite the evil behavior of his youth, he became a good person and had a family of his own before he died. Do you forgive me for keeping this from you? I wanted to protect you from the shame I felt. I never wanted that to be yours.”

I immediately got up from my chair and embraced my mother. “Mom,” I said, “there is nothing to be ashamed of. You gave me a chance to live. You kept me alive. I will forever be grateful to you.”

She began sobbing again as I held her in my arms—mother and son locked in an embrace that would transcend any description of how meaningful it was for both of us. It was wonderful to be giving her the grace and acceptance she desperately wanted. We both lacked significant knowledge about each other just hours beforehand. I did not know the circumstances of my birth. She did not know how my knowing would change our relationship. I am forever thankful that my mother heard the voice of God. I will forever praise God that he spoke to a frightened, confused, and overwhelmed teen in Cairo, Ill.

I have spent years thinking about this day and how it has changed me. First, there was a time that I believed in abortion under certain extreme circumstances. I believed that if a woman had been raped, a victim of incest, or her life was in danger, she had the right to an abortion with a clean conscience. What I didn’t realize as I formed those beliefs in my younger years was this: I had a moral position which called into question my own right to exist. Had what I believed been applied to me, there would be no me.

Second, I do believe that the whole institution of abortion feeds off of personal dishonesty. Imagine yourself going back in time and listening to a conversation between your mother and a doctor over whether you will be born. Ronald Reagan got it right when he said, “All the people in favor of abortion have already been born.” Unless a person is prone to suicidal thoughts, they would never wish themselves to have been aborted in their mother’s womb. Then how can anyone take such an action upon another that they do not wish for themselves? The golden rule of Jesus Christ is generally considered to be the greatest ethical maxim ever given in all of human history. It is simply this, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If a man or a woman cannot wish an abortion upon himself or herself, they have no right to make that decision for another.

Third, when I have preached on this subject many have attempted to get me to agree with them that abortion is a solution in some circumstances. I’ve had people tell me that if their wife or daughter were raped by the village idiot, they would have no problem encouraging her to have an abortion. The problem here is in believing that creating a second problem solves the first problem. One problem doesn’t take away another problem. It just leaves you with two problems instead of one. One plus one is still two. Abortion is not the solution to rape. I believe adoption is a pretty good solution to any pregnancy that is unwanted or unprepared for. Adoption blesses a childless family. God’s plan has always been to reverse a curse with a blessing. It should be ours as well.

Finally, our national blessing from God is in jeopardy. There have been over 50 million abortions and counting since Roe v. Wade was made law in 1973. If God is against abortion can he be for America? There will be a future day when everyone will be brought to stand before the justice scales of God—a day of reckoning. He will not hold this nation guiltless forever. Justice will prevail, either by our nation turning toward righteousness, or an unexpected encounter with God’s wrath. Every life is precious. God made it that way. And I am convinced that he will be the defender of a multitude of people who could not defend themselves.

I believe the doctor who wanted to abort me was stopped so that I could share my story with you.

—James Shupp pastors Castle Hill First Baptist Church in San Antonio.