Cecile Richards and the Culture of Death

There’s a swagger in Cecile Richards’ step as she conducts a book tour around the media surrounding her departure from the summit of Planned Parenthood after 12 years. Call it a victory lap. Everywhere she goes, adoring liberal interviewers ask her if she’ll run for office next. After all, it’s not like she has millions of little skeletons in her closet.

Vanity Fair oozed over Richards and the abortion conglomerate’s Spring Into Action gala in New York City. The headline reads, “Planned Parenthood’s Future Is So Bright, They’ve Gotta Wear Pink.” The magazine eagerly recounted event details like the “Smash the Patriarchy” cocktails and buttons with the vulgar Planned Parenthood motto: “Don’t F—k With Us, Don’t F—k Without Us.”

In our secularized culture of death, Richards is projected as a civil rights icon — the white female version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. No one found any irony whatsoever when she was honored with other “social justice warriors” on the stage of the Oscars … in the same category as a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Black lives mattered to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a racist who wanted her organization to curtail the reproduction of races that “still breed carelessly and disastrously,” as W.E.B. DuBois wrote for Sanger’s Birth Control Review.

Similarly, no one in the liberal media did a double take when in an interview with Vanity Fair, Richards was asked to name her most treasured possession and said: “My blue Shirley Temple cup. The Reverend Billy Graham baptized my mom with it when she was a girl.” Try to pair that with this next question and answer: Vanity Fair asked which historical figure she most identifies with, and she replied, “The witches of Salem.”

In her new book, Make Trouble, Richards recalls how she first made trouble almost 50 years ago at the age of 11, refusing to recite the Lord’s Prayer along with her class at University Park Elementary School in Dallas.

It’s easier to play God with the lives of the unborn when you don’t follow God’s inconvenient commandments.

No broadcaster has ruined the Planned Parenthood boss’s book tour by asking about the sale of the body parts of aborted babies. They’ve barely even mentioned abortion. Time magazine’s Belinda Luscombe ably demonstrated how the liberal media negotiate around the hard facts of what was unforgettably proved by the hidden cameras of The Center for Medical Progress.

“In 2015, Richards faced five hours of mostly hostile grilling by Congress after some activists released video purporting to show that the organization illegally sold fetal tissue,” Luscombe wrote. Ten hours of damning and skin-crawling video is dismissed as “purported.” Try to imagine Time writing about the “purported” images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The Time writer added a parenthetical: “(Several investigating committees found nothing illegal, and the activists behind the footage later faced felony charges, which are ongoing.)” The crime? Recording abortionists without their consent in California, a “two-party consent” state, at least on the matter of taping conversations.

In the alternative universe of our culture of death, the activists exposing the abortion industry are the real criminals. By contrast, Katha Pollitt of The New York Times Book Review considers it “genial, engaging and humorous” when Richards refers to the release of CMP videos as “almost like dealing with kidnappers” in her book.

But the media are hailing Richards as a “heroine of the Resistance” and a “righteous defender of the vulnerable.” Who’s most vulnerable inside a Planned Parenthood clinic? The aborted aren’t an afterthought. They are no thought at all.

The Patriot Post® · Cecile Richards and the Culture of Death