Credibility Is a Precious Coin

Jeff Miller's got two back-to-back posts that are well presented together. The second quotes from a piece by Illinois pro-life activist Jill Stanek:

During a recent interview, I mentioned that I believe one of Planned Parenthood's objectives is for girls and women to engage in illicit sex as often as possible, so as to increase the odds they'll get pregnant and have to abort.

The show host was flabbergasted. I was flabbergasted that he was flabbergasted. I reminded him that Planned Parenthood makes the bulk of its deadlihood - hundreds of millions of dollars every year - from abortion.

My theory was obviously over the top in this guy's opinion. The interview ended abruptly.

I agree with Jeff that Stanek's rhetoric about "monsters" isn't particularly helpful. As Jeff suggests, even the most fanatical of abortion's supporters are just tragically misguided human beings. It does us, them, or anybody in between no good if we lose sight of that. Important points become blurred by the heat. One such important point in Stanek's piece is that a great many of the core advocates for abortion have a stake in the industry's survival.

In the other post, Jeff notes a more subtle, bureaucratic instance of dishonest dealings on behalf of "family planning," quoting:

The report, entitled "Working from Within: Culturally Sensitive Approaches in UNFPA Programming," is a 32-page examination of [United Nations Population Fund's] efforts in nine countries to change laws and establish what it calls reproductive rights and health - an ambiguous phrase that is used throughout the report and is never defined but in UN parlance includes abortion. In its section on Brazil readers are told that one lesson to emerge from UNFPA's work in the country was that the Catholic Church was not a monolith and that essential to fighting Church teaching was identifying dissenting Catholics. "Within the Catholic Church, certain progressive branches exist, including the Communidades Eclesiais de Base, whose Catholic clergy understand the harsh realities of the country's poor and are ardent advocates on their behalf."

At some point, it comes into question whether it is advisable — even moral — to work with certain groups even where goals overlap. Credibility is a precious coin for evil.