Luana called my attention to an article on wokeness, in this case describing the ideological erosion of Planned Parenthood (henceforth “PP). Click the headline below to read the WSJ “Saturday essay”, or or find it archived free here.
Notice that the author is Pamela Paul, formerly the Sunday book-review editor and then a columnist for the NYT, whose columns over the last few years were refreshingly heterodox for (see here and here). In this way she could be seen as a white female John McWhorter, but, unlike McWhorter, she also wrote a lot about gender issues, and not in a way that, at least when the paper was about to let her go, did not comport with its gender activism and mania for “affirmative care.” As she wrote in her farewell column,
. . . . the reporting I’m most proud of is when I used my voice to stand up for people whose lives or work had come under attack, whether they were public figures or were dragged into the public eye because they’d dared to speak or act in ways that unjustly elicited professional or social condemnation: A popular novelist ostracized for alleged “cultural appropriation.” A physician assistant who was excoriated on social media for standing up to bullies. A Palestinian writer whose appearance at a prominent book fair was canceled. An early beneficiary of affirmative action who dared to explore its unintended consequences. Vulnerable gay teenagers who described being misled by a politicized medical establishment into dubious gender transition treatments. A public university president who was driven away by a campus besieged with political division. Social work students and faculty undermined by a school that had betrayed its own principles. A public health expert who risked opprobrium from his peers by calling out his profession on groupthink.
The Times may tolerate a bit of heterodoxy, but the columns Paul wrote that were critical of gender activism (see here for a list) were too much. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin was Paul’s “In defense of J. K. Rowling,” guaranteed to rile anyone who mouths the mantra, “A trans woman is a woman.”
At any rate, Paul seems to have found a home as a writer at large for the Wall Street Journal, and has written two pieces for them since June: the one below and the other an analysis of the Trump administration’s assault on scientific journals, which takes shots at both the Right and Left. Paul has trod an increasingly well-worn path: a good journalist let go because they’re insufficiently “progressive,” then finding a new home at a more centrist or even right-wing site (Paul is a classical liberal, and the WSJ’s news and analysis items are more or less centrist).
But I digress. Her new WSJ piece is how the once-estimable organization Planned Parenthood, the reproductive and sexual health care organization whose antecedent was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916, is going to ground. Perhaps it was predictable that, given its ambit, PP would buy into gender activism, just like the ACLU did or how the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) devolved into ferreting out “hate speech” by people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (The SPLC was also plagued by financial mismanagement.)
I’ll give a few quotes from Paul’s piece; they’re indented below:
Excerpts:
To American feminists, the Planned Parenthood brand symbolizes liberation and empowerment. To Medicaid recipients and rural women, it means access to affordable contraceptives, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and cancer screenings. To conservatives and opponents of abortion, it means the devaluation of human life and dissolution of the family.
But to many young people encountering Planned Parenthood today, the organization, founded in 1916 as a grassroots movement to provide family planning to poor women, means something else entirely. When a 3- to 5-year-old asks, “Is that a boy or a girl?” Planned Parenthood, currently the country’s leading provider of sex education, suggests replying, “Only an individual can define their gender identity. Gender identity is separate from what body parts a person has.” (Planned Parenthood is also now the country’s second largest provider of cross-sex hormones for transgender treatments.)
On Instagram, where young people are most likely to seek information, Planned Parenthood offers decidedly liberationist advice, including graphic descriptions of sexual techniques. Posts celebrate Pansexual Pride Day and declare that “virginity is a social construct.” In keeping with the organization’s racial justice agenda, which includes support for #DefundthePolice, its TikTok account displays a video of a Black woman seemingly fleeing and then laughing, with the tag, “Running from the police, but then they say, suspect is an abortion-rights baddie.”
As Paul reports, these stands haven’t sat well with the Trump administration:
In March, Trump withheld Title X grants, which fund contraceptive, reproductive and sexual health services for poor people, from at least nine Planned Parenthood affiliates while the administration investigates their compliance with its policies on D.E.I. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that patients do not have the right to sue states for denying state Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood clinics, making it easier for more states to withdraw funding. And earlier this month, Congress passed Trump’s megabill, which effectively ends federal Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood for the next year.
Of course I deplore the withholding of support for reproductive health services for the poor; this is part of the bullying that this Administration is known for. On the other hand, PP has taken on political stances that seem unnecessary given its classical mission:
. . . . The trouble stems from [PP’s] dual and often dueling roles as both a national advocacy organization and a local healthcare provider, one inherently political and the other necessarily nonpartisan. While its roughly 600 clinics offer patient care, the national organization operates as an advocacy group, raising money to support positions that place it firmly on the progressive left in America’s culture wars.
Well, one of these positions I do support: the advocacy of a pro-choice stand to abortion. That’s perhaps one reason the Administration is going after PP. I see the pro-choice stand as something important to the welfare of women, particularly poor ones. But other stands have little to do with at least the original mission of PP.
In the years since Wen was forced out, a different kind of mission creep set in, with the organization tethering itself to causes like democracy reform (including support for expanding the Supreme Court and ending the filibuster in the Senate) and gun control—actions that have alienated some donors, according to former employees. These moves reflect the political motivations of its workforce, increasingly populated by what some employees refer to as social justice warriors—young people who come to the organization for its progressive values more than for its provision of healthcare.
A self-described “champion for social and racial justice,” [PP President and CEO Alexis] McGill Johnson shares this vision. In a 2021 op-ed, she accused Planned Parenthood of focusing too much on “women’s health” and “privileging whiteness.” As she wrote, “What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation.”
Planned Parenthood wants to be the head of the anti-Trump resistance in all its forms, according to one former senior executive at the national office. The question, she said, is who are they alienating in the process?
Now Paul describes other problems with PP, like poorly-run clinics, a decrease in donations, and so on, but the organization is not helping itself by buying into gender activism, at least under this Administration:
Today, Planned Parenthood no longer positions itself as the leading healthcare provider for women and has largely stopped referring to women on its website and in policy statements. The only mention of “women” among its promotional items are T-shirts emblazoned with “Stand with Black Women.” In testimony before Congress, Dr. Bhavik Kumar, then a Planned Parenthood medical director and now chief medical officer at the Greater Ohio affiliate, said that “men can have pregnancies, especially transmen.”
Especially transmen? What other “men” can get pregnant? But let’s proceed:
The organization’s pervasive language around “pregnant people” is intended to be inclusive of transgender people, a cause that the organization connects to abortion rights under the umbrella of “bodily autonomy.” As Planned Parenthood put it on Threads, “trans and nonbinary people are essential to the movement for sexual and reproductive health and rights—the fight for trans rights is our fight.”
Not everyone agrees this is the best approach for a movement founded to empower women. “I don’t understand the national office’s thinking in not allowing anyone to talk about women’s health anymore,” said [former PP President Pamela] Maraldo. “These really, really left-wing ideological postures are to me just as off-putting as they are on the right when they’re counter to basic Americans’ common sense.”
Banning the word “woman” is guaranteed to alienate not just the Right, but the sensible moiety of the Left. As is this:
Planned Parenthood has also rapidly expanded its services into one of the most contested and politicized areas of healthcare, gender transitions. Its national office does not reveal numbers on these services, instead grouping them into an “other services” category in its annual report. In 2019, that category included 17,791 cases. It rose to 77,858 in 2023. With trans-identified minors, Planned Parenthood follows an “informed consent” model, which, according to its patient guidelines, enables patients to get a same-day prescription for cross-sex hormones after a 30-minute in-person or remote consultation with a staff member. No professional diagnosis is required.
Cross-sex hormones given after just 30 minutes of consultation? How old are these “minors”? Is there a lower age limit? It’s not clear from the data, but surely 12 to 17 is too young:
According to an analysis of insurance claim information by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for gender medicine in 2023. About 40% of them were 18- to 22-year-olds. Between 2017 and 2023, it also treated 12,000 kids aged 12 to 17 for gender dysphoria. (These figures do not include patients who paid out of pocket, patients at VA facilities or those covered by Kaiser.)
Don’t get me wrong: this progressivism may not be the main reason why PP is going under—its advocacy of the right to choose abortions may be pivotal, and Paul also reports about the waning of donations and hamhandedness in clinics (I’ve been to one, and it was excellent). And, at the end, she notes that the erosion of PP has inimical social effects, particularly in truncating reproductive and sexual care for the poor. I just wonder why PP has to buy into the affirmative-care model for adolescents and to curtail its use of the word “woman.” It’s not necessary for the organization’s goals, and alienates the powers that be. In the end, PP’s progressivism, which it refuses to abandon, may be its death blow.
I look forward to more articles like this from Paul, who, I think need no longer be afraid of writing what she think lest she alienate her paper.
Two rules help interpret Planned Parenthood‘s … “plans” :
• Marxists share your vocabulary, not your dictionary
• Marxists always lie
This might be broadened to “Hegelians”. So right from ground level this gives some dimension to “planning” – who precisely is doing the “planning”? And for what?
And “parenthood” – who precisely is the “parent”?
Note that Planned Parenthood simply says Sanger’s interests in eugenics have nothing to do with Planned Parenthood.
Also note that Margaret Mead was associated with the organization at some point, but I have not read anything more than that. I had mixed them up before – Mead, Sanger.
This is one of Robert Conquest’s laws: all such organisations end up going woke simply because “social justice” activists put most effort into career paths that get them into senior positions in that sort of NGO. A right-leaning person is instead likely to head for industry and business.
Indeed Coel. Mr. Conquest’s law is surprisingly resilient. I get the impression that the woke cultural revolution is pushed (like the Chinese one) from the kids up.
There’s a great essay a few years ago “The Elephant in the Zoom” which discusses this regarding Washington NGOs.
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/
I’m not a big fan of the Intercept generally, but they’re so on the Money here.
Cheers Coel!
D.A.
NYC
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
(Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time)
The number of children harmed by trans activism, terrible though that is, is minuscule compared to the number of people, including children, who will be harmed by the weakening and possible elimination of Planned Parenthood. There is no justification for Trump’s harmful actions, which likely aren’t even motivated by the nominal woke aspect but rather by the role of PP in birth control, as Jerry mentions. The trans excuse is just something acceptable to a larger proportion of the population than anti-abortion, which resonates with his religious base. We shouldn’t be seduced by it.
You’re first sentence is right on. PP really does provide essential health services, that’s why this descent into wokeness is such a tragedy, irrespective of what the Trumpistas do.
I agree most of the consequences of defunding PP are bad, and Trump’s policies seem terrible. But as you say this would all still be happening — Trump would still be targeting PP for its abortion work — even if PP had just stuck to its mission and avoided embracing a medical fad based on catering to the sexual delusions of anxious autistic gay teens. So one still has to ask why did they do this? Why risk giving him cover to attack them? And was it really worth it?
Imagine an orthopaedic surgeon who mostly does great work helping disadvantaged victims of accidents and disease, but also caters to a minuscule number of her patients who have Body Integrity Identity Disorder by affirming the patients’ desire to amputate a healthy limb. That surgeon would still deserve to be disciplined or struck off for such malpractice in spite of all the other great work she does. I think PP has wandered into that territory by medically mutilating thousands of its patients with cross-sex hormones.
Exactly. Its descent into transgender madness is deplorable but most of the comments at the WSJ article are sticking with “abortion is murder” responses.
The organization doesn’t seem to have much presence in Canada, where abortion is legal.
The difference in Canada is not that abortion is legal here. It’s legal in the states that most Americans live in, too. The difference here is that it’s publicly funded and the provinces can’t legally de-list it as a publicly insured service, even if they might wish to. Private-practice doctors also can’t decline to do abortion because the government reimbursement is too low, or because they morally oppose it. There is nothing for PP to do here, nothing to fund-raise for.
In states where abortion is illegal, PP is not going to be arranging, doing, or paying for many abortions, except insofar as they want to thwart the law. In the U.S. the battleground is the states where abortion is legal, but reimbursed at the discretion of insurance carriers and Medicaid.* That’s where PP steps in, and that’s where an Administration eager to reduce the number of abortions done in “legal” states can apply pressure blaming PP’s trans activism. The Machiavellian in me says PP has brought this on itself and should pay for its folly. If the consequence is indeed fewer abortions paid for, meh. If PP thought it was doing God’s work by arranging abortions, it shouldn’t have so recklessly put itself in Satan’s crosshairs by transing minor children.
(* We may see the Administration taking analogous action through its anti-trust powers to de-fund genderwang care in Blue states that will never on this green earth pass Tennessee-type laws directly banning it. Rather the Federal Trades Commission might accuse the medical industry of deceptive practices in the provision of cosmetic, esthetic, and mutilatory services under the false guise of medical necessity. This could constitute a conspiracy to defraud the insurance companies by deceptively claiming the services were to ameliorate an actual bona fide medical condition, rather than one invented for profit. The Trump Administration has already moved to tell insurance companies that for them to de-list these services and drug coverage would not constitute illegal discrimination by sex. Skrmetti will cast a long shadow.)
Thanks for clarifying the Canada / US situation.
Oh, yes, they can! But they are obliged to refer a patient on to a doctor who will. The other docs in my small community all declined to dirty their hands and would tell such a patient to make an appointment with me. I was glad to be able to help out and many patients stuck with me afterwards as they had felt shamed by their previous physician.
But if you retired and there was no effective referral available they would have to do it themselves if push came to shove and a patient complained to the regulator. Whether they could be compelled to learn to do a surgical procedure is uncertain — perhaps not if a recent decision by an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal in a case about gender surgery (which is not binding on the medical regulator) is a guide — but medical abortion would be another matter. My point was that the profession can’t collectively decide it doesn’t want to do abortion, euthanasia, or gender manipulation if there is a public demand for it.
I’m not sure I agree. The implications of everyone needing to look within in order to discover “what sex they feel they are” — with society and law obediently affirming this as definitive or else — could very well have wider, more serious implications and create more longterm harm than withholding abortion and contraception from poor women (which is of course heinous.) Gender ideology ought to be a flash in the cultural pan. But what if it isn’t?
Planned Parenthood isn’t just encouraging cosmetic changes (“bodily autonomy.”) It’s rubber stamping the idea that a minor who hates her body and wants to be a different sex is just like a girl who wants to have sex, or who had it and became pregnant. The “trans excuse” isn’t just an otherwise minor aspect of Planned Parenthood’s basic mission. As they themselves argue, it’s embedded in their mission – and vice versa.
You may be right, but it’s a Hobson’s choice being forced on the non consenting. How will PP ever change if we let a major issue slide in favor of another major issue? They need critics on the Left.
“Gender ideology ought to be a flash in the cultural pan. But what if it isn’t?”
A sobering thought. Genderism is so culturally limited that I can’t believe it will persist. But you’re right to ask what if it does stick around for another 100 years, like the ideas of Marx (Bryan will remind us that it is Marxist…) or Freud?
What could physicians or sociologists or philosophers or feminists do now to help our society avoid that future? Is there anything we could learn from the failure to head off communists or psychotherapists and direct them to something less destructive like income tax reform or cognitive behavioural therapy?
😁
In a hasty nutshell: Theosophy ; Hermetic ;
consider :
Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought – Behmenism and its Development in England
B. J. Gibbons
Cambridge U. Press
1996
Behmenism refers to Jakob Böhme (1575-1624).
Marx says somewhere he inverted Hegel’s Idealistic dialectic to effect transformation in material terms.
It’s all the same general layout of Hermetic Theosophy – that is, an ex-theologia, man-as-god – individual and collectively – not or – totalizing.
I mean, if I want a religion of one, sure – except when I start blaming its failure on lack of popular interest 😁.
For crying out loud, all of you. “Gender identity” (theory or practice), is not based on Marxism conceptually nor even by its historical derivation. The individuals and movements that gave it its modern form(s) were, like all y’all, committed anti-leftists, anti-Marxists. Whenever I read stuff like this it makes me doubt that writer has even a glancing acquaintance with either thing. Gender identity ideology and activism is built with subjective idealism; Marxism, dialectical materialsm. They don’t play well together. Marxists have been criticizing the ideas and politics of transgenderism since the 1970s.
The word you’re looking for is liberalism (or maybe libertarianism?), not leftism.
Not to single you out particularly or personally, Mike. I was scrolling through the comments and it was random chance I stopped on yours.
No problem, not taken personally!! Like I said, Bryan (not me) will (and did) remind us that genderism is marxist. I don’t care much whether it is or not. I mentioned marxism and psychoanalysis as examples of influential ideas that were based on horrifyingly durable errors in understanding human nature, similar to influential and horrifyingly wrong ideas about gender (innate and fixed at birth, yet fluid and spectrum-like; born in the wrong body; blah blah). Our culture failed to head off marxism and psychoanalysis. What if we fail to head off genderism?
It is a forlorn hope that the profession will abandon of its own accord its thrall to genderwang. Doctors can be punished professionally for not doing it and, if their ethically and scientifically informed demurral — “This will all work out if we just let Nature take its course. You’ll see. Trust me.” — is construed as conversion therapy, they can go to jail. We’re going to have to follow here, not lead, and that means quietly supporting legislated bans (instead of opposing Alberta’s law as our associations are beclowning themselves by doing, winning an injunction by claiming that normal puberty causes irreparable harm), not daring to deny it to individual patients who demand it. Even public utterances unrelated to a patient may have us ending up like Amy Hamm if an activist furious at the government’s policy decides to take a shot at us.
Unlike other ill-founded medical fads like lobotomy for schizophrenia and hysterectomy for swooning, doctors didn’t risk being struck off for declining to participate because there was no activist public clamour to receive these treatments as a human right. Rather, there came to be a groundswell of public opinion against medical tyranny that led the licensing regulators to frown on these treatments. Doctors just stopped professing belief in them to avoid trouble. If a traditional immigrant family today demands that a doctor do female genital mutilation on their daughter, he can reply, very carefully to avoid complaints about cultural insensitivity, that it is illegal and he’d lose his licence. This is the solution you need for gender-motivated mutilation. The Trump Administration’s efforts to crush Planned Parenthood is another, though not relevant to Canada. Unfortunately it’s not going to come from us, as legislation and executive policy governing medical practice you might think ought to. We have been cowed if not captured.
(*Sorry, that should have been, “In other ill-founded medical fads, . . .”)
I think modernity has an odd concept of “identity” that is more extensive than just the current gender lunacy. The confusion is partly just semantic: depending of context, the word “identity” can mean 1. The objective state of the existence of the person and 2. How the person perceives and understands their being. The meanings are VERY different. Thus it makes sense to say that Donald Trump self-identifies as a stable genius, but more debatable that the identity of Donald Trump is that of a stable genius. People get confused by this elementary distinction.
“I’m not sure I agree. The implications of everyone needing to look within in order to discover “what sex they feel they are” — with society and law obediently affirming this as definitive or else — could very well have wider, more serious implications and create more longterm harm than withholding abortion and contraception from poor women (which is of course heinous.)”
The implications are potentially far more serious. Jon Gallant’s frequent allusions to Soviet days are not off the mark.
I used to give a very modest annual, $50 type range, to PP for years. I stopped maybe 2 years ago when they went all into the genderwang. Abortions I’ll pay for, STI testing and screenings, health care – but a “gendered soul” and the rest of their catalogue… nah.
Ditto Amnesty Int’l and the ACLU (whose decline has annoyed PCC(E), given his history, in these pages).
Institutions, magazines, broadcast services CAN decline and we have to be alert to that and act/donate accordingly.
D.A.
NYC
It seems counterproductive for Planned Parenthood to stake out public positions on these hot-button issues. The organization is already in the crosshairs, so why would they put themselves in further danger of being cut off from government funding? Maybe it’s Planned Parenthood’s employees who are pushing the broader organization into the weeds. When they find themselves out of jobs, they may get the message, but I hope that it does not come down to that.
Why? Because they identify as righteous. Being useful and effective seem to be secondary
“Self-righteous people do more harm than outright villains: at least the villain is honest about his motives.”
(Anonymous)
I think it is a false assumption that if PP goes away, that health care for its clients will go away. They will have other options, maybe not as convenient, but no woman will be denied care.
On another subject regarding the loss of federal funding, note that NPR and PBS will not go away. They will adjust to the funds they raise. With regard to public broadcasting delivering essential services to rural America, go ask rural America how they much they depend on public broadcasting. You’ll find it’s not 1970 any longer out in the sticks.
“I think it is a false assumption that if PP goes away, that health care for its clients will go away. ”
🎯
I think it is a false assumption that if PP goes away, health care for its clients will go away. They will have other options, maybe not as convenient, but no woman will be denied care.
On another subject regarding the loss of federal funding, note that NPR and PBS will not go away. They will adjust to the funds they raise. With regard to public broadcasting delivering essential services to rural America, go ask rural America how they much they depend on public broadcasting. You’ll find it’s not 1970 any longer out in the sticks.
I thought PBS was already separately funded, mainly by Hamas, Hezb, and the Muslim Brotherhood. PBS like the once great BBC are translatory services which just switch the original Arabic of their text into English for the convenience of their audience.
D.A.
NYC
Thank you for calling attention that the author was Pamela Paul, previously NYT op-ed writer and Book Review editor, and for the link to a previous WEIT article.
The article by PP was well written and hopefully she contributes more in the future.
I would like to find an article giving an example of an organization like ACLU or Planned Parenthood that suffered from over-expanding their “scope”, but managed to correct things and regain success.
That would indeed be interesting. There is surely a road (long or short) from the start of the rot to the eventual going off a cliff; the hard job is reading the signs along the way.
If you want to find out how toxic gender ideology is for the medical field I suggest you follow the NHS Fife and Sandy Peggie employment tribunal that is currently occcuring.
It is utterly shocking and deplorable.
Yes! I’d like to see the text of the first edition of the NHS Fife recent press release that was described as “petulant” and has been revised 4 times so far.
Right. Someone on this thread put me onto DIAG (Democrarts for an Informed Approach to Gender — quite an extensive and well informed website) — Planned Parenthood, ACLU, and SPLC are discussed there. DIAG has suggestions for how to respond when the funding solicitation letters arrive from those organizations and from gender-clueless Dem candidates…
Thanks for the post. I’ll try to to find a way to get the NYT paywalled Pamela Paul articles.
This article is at the WSJ. She left NYT.