Planned Parenthood Kicks Off Lobbying Effort
The group seeks to recruit 1 million people to vote for candidates who support its agenda — including abortion rights and birth control.
The political wing of Planned Parenthood on Tuesday announced an unprecedented voter-mobilization effort targeting the young, often low-income women who rely on the group’s clinics for gynecological exams, birth control and abortion.
The nonprofit expects to raise at least $10 million over the next 10 months to recruit patients, as well as their friends and families, to lobby legislators and vote for candidates who support Planned Parenthood’s agenda.
That agenda includes support for abortion rights, but the campaign will emphasize issues such as affordable contraception, comprehensive sex education in public schools and increased subsidies for Planned Parenthood’s basic healthcare services, including pap smears, breast exams and HIV tests. Some of those services have been threatened by budget cuts at the state and federal levels.
“To do the work we need to do, we simply have to have change” in the political climate, said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
The campaign, called “One Million Strong,” will be the group’s most ambitious and expensive effort ever, Richards said. In 2004, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund spent about $7.5 million on advocacy.
Planned Parenthood’s doctors will not directly ask patients to join the movement. But in the past, clinics have had considerable success getting patients to call legislators or send postcards to Congress simply by displaying political material in waiting rooms.
Other strategies include reaching out to young people at rock concerts and church services, canvassing door-to-door, and using MySpace and other social networking sites to identify supporters.
Planned Parenthood says it serves 5 million patients a year; 1 in 4 American women will visit a clinic at some point in her life.
Richards said she thought it would not be hard to persuade patients, who already trust Planned Parenthood with their healthcare, to follow the group’s lead on political activism.
“People will come to know Planned Parenthood in an entirely different way,” she said.
David O’Steen, who runs a major antiabortion campaign, said he was certain Planned Parenthood’s drive would be well-funded. Still, he dismissed the group’s talk of mobilizing more than a million voters in November. “They don’t have the grass-roots base,” he said. “They just don’t.”
Just a few months ago, O’Steen’s National Right to Life Committee promised a massive grass-roots effort on behalf of former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, a Republican candidate for president. Thompson dropped out of the race Tuesday after poor showings in early primaries.
But O’Steen promised renewed vigor from his volunteers during the general election season.
National Right to Life spent about $2 million in 2004. O’Steen would not divulge the group’s budget for this campaign cycle.
© 2008 The Los Angeles Times
The most important thing we can do for the planet is to support Planned Parenthood.
I don’t think the organisation can be trusted to be or really do good. Based on what I’ve read of PP, it is NOT good and is another ruling elites’ front.
Mike C:
Please show evidence for your attack on Planned Parenthood and give alternatives.
Planned Parenthood has been a force for good medical care for women and their partners for years. They have supported efforts to teach our children about their bodies and how to take care of themselves, long before AID/HIV and STD were so rampant. They have supported comprehensive sex and health education in our schools and have supported programs to get parents more involved in the lives of their children. PP has often been the only group to offer high quality, non-judgmenal medical care to women of limited to modest means in many communities. They have been in the forefront against the forces of darkness [when it comes to women’s health, choices and means to exercise that choice]. People who attack PP, often have the strangest ideas about who they are and what they really seek to accomplish. I think anyone who believes the government and the church should stay out of our bedrooms and the bodies of women, should whole-heartedly support Planned Parenthood and their clinics nationwide.
EZE FLYER — I saw a google video “ENDGANE” of how the eugenics and brain bumps of Nazi’s superiority grew into PP, from 30s-60s (I had read previously that this part of the “German final Solution” was home USA grown).
I recall one piece of “evidence” was that 80% of the abortion clinics were located in impoverished communities, so that blacks were being systematically exterminated (by their own “parents”), compared to any other neighborhoods.
The other part was the founding “fathers” may have been twisted bankers, or possibly just attempting to do good (as they saw it) to make themselves more money (taxes?)
EZE FLYER — I saw a google video “ENDGANE” of how the eugenics and brain bumps of Nazi’s superiority grew into PP, from 30s-60s (I had read previously that this part of the “German final Solution” was home USA grown).
Why does every argument have to end up with a Nazi reference? Its just comical to me.
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“I recall one piece of “evidence” was that 80% of the abortion clinics were located in impoverished communities, so that blacks were being systematically exterminated (by their own “parents”), compared to any other neighborhoods.”
Conservatives are quick to draw analogies with Nazism for anything they don’t agree with and will go to any extent with their propaganda to support their twisted views. I’m sure Nazis were aborting or enabling abortion of Black kids. But how does that find its relation to a movement which is about giving women the right to decide instead of their fucking pastor!
We should be more concerned about our President turning our country into the “Fourth” Reich rather than women getting knocked up and wanting to abort or them fruitcakes wanting to get married!
SPARTANLADKENNY - Clinics today in the USA, not in Germany.
The suggestion that I’m a conservative have been greatly exaggerated, and that I believe all things on google videos as well.
BTW, I was just responding to a previous request for more info, and although I do approve of the PP goals and support for woman’s rights, I also suspect much of what we read to be fully spun up.
That is part of the problem of truth, to de-spin, and attempt to see “where goes the money”