American Family Association: Tell Lawmakers on Recess to Defund Planned Parenthood
TUPELO, Miss.—Lawmakers around the country are in their own districts during the August recess, and American Family Association (AFA, www.afa.net) says now is the time to contact them directly and urge them to defund Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, of $500 million in taxpayer funds.
In an Action Alert sent to its one million-plus friends and supporters, AFA is encouraging concerned Americans to contact their lawmakers face-to-face about this important issue.
“With our elected members of Congress on August recess, now is the perfect time to talk to them directly about defunding Planned Parenthood,” said AFA President Tim Wildmon. “Planned Parenthood is gruesomely, systematically and literally slaughtering millions of innocent unborn children, then selling their tiny body parts, using the most barbaric practices to do so. We have witnessed this in seven extremely disturbing videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s activities. Our representatives and senators need to hear from us personally. With a single vote, Congress can put an end to the $528 million cash flow funneled to Planned Parenthood from taxpayers.”
The seventh video released last week by the Center for Medical Progress, according to LifeNews.com, described the harvesting of the brain of a baby who was still alive with a beating heart. This video again features phlebotomist Holly O’Donnell, who, reports LifeNews, “unsuspectingly took a job as a ‘procurement technician’ at the fetal tissue company and biotech start-up StemExpress in late 2012.” The company acted as a middleman and purchased the body parts of aborted babies from Planned Parenthood to sell to research universities and other places. StemExpress recently announced it was ending its relationship with Planned Parenthood.
“The new video,” LifeNews.com reported, “includes O’Donnell’s eyewitness narrative of the daily practice of fetal body parts harvesting in Planned Parenthood abortion clinics. She tells the harrowing story of harvesting an intact brain from a late-term male unborn baby whose heart was still beating after the abortion.”
According to Alliance Defending Freedom, 13,540 clinics around the country provide comprehensive health care for women—and do not provide abortions—versus 665 Planned Parenthood locations, many of which do provide abortions. See the map here.
“So when elected officials try to convince us that Planned Parenthood is a vital source of health care for women,” Wildmon added, “we can set them straight and debunk their attempts to misrepresent the truth. That $528 million can be distributed to much more worthy organizations that do not murder babies and sell their body parts. The House and Senate leadership is not doing enough to defund America’s abortion giant, and until representatives and senators hear from their constituents, it will be business as usual.”
AFA suggests several ways to take action to protect the unborn and stop Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices:
- Call the offices of congressman and senators while they are on recess and ask for a personal meeting to discuss why the federal government must defund Planned Parenthood immediately. Find officials’ contact information here.
- Attend a local townhall meeting with family, neighbors and friends. Numbers USA and Heritage Action have provided lists of townhall meetings being hosted by elected officials during the August recess. Information about local events may also be listed on officials’ web sites.
- Pray for courage to stand up for those who cannot defend themselves. The lives of innocent babies are too precious to allow Planned Parenthood to go unchallenged.
This past weekend, more than 300 protests were organized in nearly every state across the nation in front of Planned Parenthood facilities. AFA signed on as a co-sponsor to the #ProtestPP effort and encouraged the pro-life community to find ways to stand for the unborn in their hometowns.
American Family Association offers its friends and supporters several mobile apps through http://www.afa.net/resources/mobile-apps/. The AFA Action Alerts app, with breaking news and action alerts, is available for the iPhone and iPad on the Apple App Store, on Google Play and on the Amazon Appstore for Android. The AFR (American Family Radio) app is available for Apple and Android products, and the AFA Action app with, for example, voter information at election time, is available on Apple and Android platforms.
