Are We Weimar?

“How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations!… Her children have gone away.” — Lamentations 1:1, 5

Alright, everybody, time for a pop quiz: What were the four leading causes of death in the United States from 2022 to 2023?

Time’s up. Put down your pencils. The answers are, in order:

1. heart disease
2. cancer
3. COVID-19
4. abortions performed by Planned Parenthood

Surprised by number four? You shouldn’t be. Planned Parenthood (PP) is a genocidal juggernaut, a mighty slayer of the unborn. Its “business is abortion, abortion and more abortion,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, reminds us in a statement issued to the media (April 17). And yet, PP’s annual report for 2022-2023, titled Above & Beyond, still “shocks the conscience,” Dannenfelser says, showing that it “ended nearly 393,000 American lives in a single year.” This “puts abortions performed by Planned Parenthood in the top four leading causes of death.”

Every year, the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) releases a Data Brief on “Mortality in the United States.” If it had included figures from Above & Beyond in its most recent release (Dec. 2022), abortions performed by PP would have ranked fourth, behind only heart disease (695,547 deaths), cancer (605,213), and COVID-19 (416,893).

In fact, more Americans died at the hands of Planned Parenthood than died from strokes (162,890), Alzheimer’s disease (119,399), and diabetes (103,294) combined.

As Dannenfelser says, abortion is PP’s business. And business is booming. PP received $700 million in taxpayer funding (one-third of its total revenue), closing the fiscal year with $2.5 billion in net assets — a pretty penny. And it’s made good use of that money. “Nearly one in four women has had an abortion,” PP proclaims, and “demand at Planned Parenthood health centers in states where abortion is protected has soared by up to 700%.”