Special Interest Bills
California legislators all have a cause – or should I say causes? I recently read an article in our local newspaper that announced 2,576 bills have been introduced to the Legislature before the session deadline. Some are “intent” bills that merely promise more details someday. Ah, perhaps, in the interest of time and effort, our representatives will just pass them and read them later. There are also “sponsored bills” that are written by lobbyists and handed off to legislators who will claim them as their own. Some of these bills will be eliminated in a less-than-transparent assembly appropriations committee.
Buried in this pile is AB624 authored (?) by Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel to enact a law that Planned Parenthood’s telephone number be printed on every student ID in the state. Doesn’t that qualify as advertising? Isn’t this special interest pandering? Is the assumption now that every teenager will need birth control and/or an abortion on demand?
Frankly, I don’t think Planned Parenthood needs the publicity. Business is booming. The organization’s 2018 annual report claims 332,757 abortions last year.
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, opposed abortion, believing it would disappear if women were able to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Her mother, Anne Higgins, an Irish-Catholic, was pregnant 18 times in 22 years, 11 live births. She died at the age of 49, leaving Margaret, a middle child, to do household chores and take care of younger siblings. Margaret trained as a nurse probationer, married, gave up her education (by choice?), suffered from recurring active tubercular condition, and had three children. Later, she worked as a visiting nurse in the slums of East Side New York City. Her life experiences likely shaped her thinking.
Concerned with over-population, Sanger advocated limiting births, and saw an overlap of birth control and eugenics to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit”. She believed in mandatory sterilization, and divided society into three groups: educated and informed (those who did limit births), intelligent and responsible (wanted to limit birth, but lacked means and know-how), and irresponsible and reckless (those who chose not to prevent pregnancy or limit family size). Sanger’s view on this latter group: “There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”
Sanger handed out flyers (printed in caps) to women who came to her first birth control clinic. DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT “because life had not begun”. Sanger acknowledged life begins at conception and strongly believed women should have all the facts regarding reproduction. On that, I agree. Our children need the truth and real scientific facts of life so they can make informed decisions about whether they are ready for an intimate relationship that can conceive a child. Choice requires real information, not the creative rhetoric, stifled facts and deceptive advertising of organizations that profit from abortion.
I can only hope that buried in that stack of 2575 new bills, there is one to enact a law requiring all students, regardless of gender, to watch “The Miracle of Life”, a movie that shows photographic footage of conception and the development of a human being – and that such a bill wouldn’t die in the assembly appropriations committee.