Portland, OR — Actress and political activist Jane Fonda received the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s highest award at a dinner at the Portland Hilton.
Fonda received the Margaret Sanger Award — named for Planned Parenthood’s founder — at the pro-abortion group’s annual convention. Federation President Gloria Feldt says Fonda, who serves on a Planned Parenthood advisory board, has helped the organization take a more active role in politics and has shown a keen understanding of many of the pressures facing young girls.
Fonda has also been a major political donor to the pro-abortion movement. In 2000, she gave more than $12 million dollars to help bankroll an advertising and get-out-the-vote effort to help candidates supporting legalized abortion.
Speaking at the awards dinner, Fonda became “animated” discussing the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, a program she founded that combats teen pregnancy.
“It’s interesting if you look at our country compared to other industrialized countries,” Fonda said, adding, “In Europe, for example, they look at the same television, they look at the same video games, they probably have sex just as much. But they don’t have the abortions, they don’t have the out-of-wedlock births, they don’t have the AIDS we have.”
Fonda said she “doesn’t disagree” with abstinence education programs but believes only promoting abstinence will not do enough to prevent teen pregnancy. Teen pregnancy should be treated as a “public health issue,” as it is in Europe, Fonda said. “[Europeans] feel young people have the right to accurate information,” Fonda said, adding, “They’re treated like human beings instead of like people that need to be scared, chaste and ashamed of their bodies and ashamed of pleasure — and left in the dark as though somehow that was going to prevent them from having sex.”
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email [email protected].)
