The Climate Change Planned Parenthood Connection
Climate Change and the Planned Parenthood controversy have more in common than meets the eye.
Last week President Obama announced his latest plan for combating climate change by introducing new emission rules for coal-fueled power plants. After first global cooling and then global warming failed to materialize over the past few decades, climate change is now the environmentalist mantra. It’s a safe choice, because change is the only constant when it comes to climate. Environmentalists will always be able to point to extreme weather changes in some part of the world to justify their agenda of sacrificing individual rights by forcefully imposing ever increasing regulations and taxes on individuals and corporations.
That every environmentalist doomsday prediction has turned out to be wrong, and that every computer generated climate change model has been found inadequate, has not deterred the believers. In insisting on pursuing their agenda despite the lack of evidence, hard-core environmentalist have abandoned reason for faith. They have distanced themselves from honest scientific inquiry and selectively focused on data that vaguely support their hypotheses while ignoring or doctoring data that don’t.
(At SEPARATE!, our position is that no climate threats, real or imagined, justify violating individual rights, including property rights. On the contrary, only in free societies where rights are protected can the challenges that nature presents man with be effectively addressed. Only in free societies do individuals have the incentive to come together voluntarily to preserve and increase the value of their property. Only in societies where men are free to think, and put their thoughts into action, will technologies emerge that continuously make nature less of a threat to mankind. Conversely, in free societies mankind is not a threat to nature. In unfree countries, it is. The degree of man-made environmental damage is inversely related to the recognition and protection of property rights. Witness the massive disasters that occurred, and are still occurring, in what used to be the Soviet Union and East Germany, in Communist China, and in other places where rights were or still are routinely violated on a massive scale.)
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In the past few weeks, undercover video interviews with Planned Parenthood representatives by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress about the harvesting and sale of aborted fetal organs and tissue for medical purposes have been used to reignite the debate over public funding of Planned Parenthood.
Ignoring the fact that 1st trimester fetal organs and tissue don’t constitute actual but potential human body parts, anti-abortionists are using the interviews to further their goal of restricting all abortions on faith-based grounds. Furthermore, ignoring the fact that individual rights only apply to actual, not potential human beings, the anti-abortionists advocate for violating the rights of women in the difficult position of having to terminate a pregnancy (actual human beings), in favor of protecting the non-existing rights of embryos and 1st and early/mid 2nd term fetuses (potential human beings).
(At SEPARATE!, we’re all for defunding Planned Parenthood as part of a larger effort to separate state and healthcare in recognition of individual rights. We’ll wholeheartedly support anybody with a plan to defund Planned Parenthood along with a plan to return control of all healthcare decisions to individual Americans. This would include organized exits from Medicare and Medicaid, regulatory reform shutting down the FDA and unshackling health insurance providers, and terminating government supported medical research. But we’re unsupportive of faith based efforts to selectively defund Planned Parenthood without addressing the massive individual rights violations in other areas of healthcare.
And we don’t deny that legitimate concerns with harvesting and selling fetal parts and tissue merit inquiry when occurring in the later stages of pregnancy when the line between a potential and actual human being starts to get blurred.)
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What is the connection between the climate change and Planned Parenthood issues? As far apart as the radical environmentalist and anti-abortion movements may seem, they share one fundamental trait: both are faith based.
“Faith” is defined as “blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.”
For radical environmentalists, “climate change” is the latest ideational content blindly accepted on faith. A period of unseasonably cold winters, a period of unseasonably warm winters, or a period of winters with unseasonable oscillation between cold and warm, are all events they feel are results of human activity absent real evidence or proof.
For the radical anti-abortionists, the harvesting and sale of aborted fetal organs and tissue from 1st and early 2nd trimester abortions is the latest ideational content blindly accepted on faith. Disregarding the distinction between actual and potential human beings, and the fact that rights only apply to the former, they feel that all abortions are violating the non-existent rights of embryos and fetuses absent real evidence or proof.
In all faith based movements many followers are mistaken, misled and misguided. When facing contradictions between their faith and new facts, they are often willing to embark on the deeply personal and often long journey of reconciling faith based beliefs with new evidence or proof with the common outcome of eventually adjusting their faith to the new facts. If, to the contrary, you are inclined to pick faith over facts—be it on climate change, planned parenthood, or some other issue—we only ask that you first pause and reflect. Because violating the rights of your fellow men in the name of your faith is wrong, regardless what your feelings tell you.