What do Planned Parenthood and Playboy have in common?

An easier question to answer would be, what do they NOT have in common?

Planned Parenthood and Playboy are quite comfortable bedfellows, pun most definitely intended. Hugh Hefner contributes money to PP as well as NARAL, as a matter of fact. (Radical pro-choice feminists don’t like to talk about that.) Allan Guttmacher, former PP director and founder of its research arm, The Guttmacher Institute, was heavily influenced by Alfred Kinsey, the radical and infamous sociologist whose “research” helped shape the sexual revolution and by extension Playboy and the porn industry. His motives and methodology have since been widely discredited.

Both Planned Parenthood and Playboy encourage women to take little pink pills every day that cause early abortions, hormone imbalances, and quite possibly a host of other diseases after long term use, such as breast cancer and heart disease.

Both are super duper A-okay with abortion. Because after all, if you can convince a woman to take that pill and “take care of her problem,” you can continue to view her as an object and use her for your pleasure. If her eggs and her babies are disposable, why then, so is she.

It is imperative for us to understand that abortion does not exist in a vacuum. A culture steeped in certain attitudes was necessary to bring about the paradigm shift that enabled legalization to occur and to continue. These attitudes are represented perfectly by Planned Parenthood and the porn industry, soft-core and otherwise.

First, there is the idea that sex is a recreational activity designed for physical gratification, and that it’s therefore perfectly acceptable and even healthy to divorce the act completely from love or procreation. Putting aside religious beliefs or a lack thereof, it’s apparent that this increasingly prevailing attitude has led to a culture in which sex has been stripped of all significance beyond how fun it is. To take a random example, let’s look at two prime-time television shows on major networks. First there’s “Glee,” marketed to teenagers, and literally encouraging them to fornicate and telling them they’re frigid if they don’t. Then we have “Two and a Half Men,’ featuring a (now almost grown) child, in which the child’s uncle, played by a real-life lothario, drug addict, and woman-beater, is characterized solely by his rampant promiscuity and total disregard for women as anything other than objects by which to achieve pleasure. He loves to talk about these things in front of his under-age nephew. These are on during the family hour. Children watch these shows, and they learn simply and merely that sex is something fun to do, not that it’s serious or sacred in the least.

So what outcome does this laissez-faire attitude have? Teen pregnancy. Single motherhood, which even after correcting for poverty is the greatest single indicator of whether a child will grow up to be a criminal. A bloated welfare state, in which taxpayers watch their money pay to feed children born because their parents met in a club one night and felt like “doing it,” and she never even got the guy’s number. I could go on, but you get the idea. The state of the American family, and by extension our entire society, is what you might call in the current vernacular a “hot mess.”

Meanwhile, in Playboy/Planned Parenthood Land, the only gravitas reserved for the subject of sex is not for issues of morality or even ethics – what are those? – but the dreaded outcomes of STDs and pregnancy, which by the way are considered more or less equal in terms of desirability. In fact, as a friend of mine was told at a Planned Parenthood appointment in the late 90s, it’s better to be pregnant than get herpes, because you can always have an abortion, but there’s no cure for herpes.

Then there is the completely erroneous yet still common idea that it’s somehow liberating for a woman to be viewed as an object and used as a vehicle for a man’s pleasure. It’s obvious how Playboy encourages this, and by extension all of popular culture. Consider the nauseating TV hit “The Girls Next Door,” in which Hugh Hefner’s three “girlfriends” earnestly spoke to the camera about how normal and fulfilling their lives were. Methinks the ladies did protest too much.

Planned Parenthood goes even further to encourage the objectification of women. Part of it is their ferocious peddling of contraceptives and prophylactics, but abortion is the most direct way in which PP helps men see women as objects. Abortion places the onus of responsibility for a pregnancy on the woman. Because abortion is legal and encouraged by organizations such as PP as a valid and responsible choice, men in our society often feel quite justified in offering a woman the money for an abortion, and— that’s it. At that point, he has “done right by her.” He offered to pay for it, so he did his part. I have known a few women personally who aborted their children because the father didn’t want them. It’s no excuse, but this is a terrible burden to place on women.

The idea that abortion is pro-woman is patently ridiculous when you consider how much the industry has in common with pornography. When we think of exploiting women, we immediately think of sexually explicit photos and videos. But abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women. The sight of a Planned Parenthood sitting in a strip shopping center in a poor neighborhood in my hometown is more offensive to me than a million photographs of a saline-enhanced blonde in an American flag bikini straddling a Corvette.

Playboy, Hustler, Maxim, Sports Illustrated, and their ilk, not to mention hard-core porn, denigrate a woman’s soul by viewing her as a body without one, but abortion places a woman’s soul in danger by making her party to her own child’s death. The abortion industry exploits a woman’s fear and ignorance, invades her body, and brings death to her very womb. Then, unlike Christ, who told the woman taken in adultery to “go and sin no more,” they tell her, “Go do whatever you want with whoever you want. You have our number.”

Which reminds me: something else Playboy and Planned Parenthood have in common? Millions and millions of dollars.