This is paranoia. "Funding MAY BE direct, or MAY GO through third party foundations … " How, exactly, is a dollar “freed up without restriction to perform abortions”? I want a step-by-step run-through of this process. I want to see money changing hands. I want a paper trail. If you can’t provide that, with back up (and film at eleven), pack it in.
tammy57
Paranoia? Sorry to inform you, but this happens all the time. People give money to a foundation with lofty stated goals. That foundation bundles the donations and makes sizable donations to individual charities or to other foundations who, in turn, distribute to individual charities. Significant examples include the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Tides Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and so on.
For example, in 2007, the
Gates Foundation gave Planned Parenthood over $22 million in unrestricted grants.
In 2006, it was a little over $11 million.
That money can basically be used however Planned Parenthood chooses to use it.
This
GAO report says that the Federal government provided over $155 million in FY96 to Planned Parenthood. As it stands, Federal law prohibits PP from directly using that money to provide abortions. But they can use that money to provide anything else: ob/gyn checkups, breast cancer screenings, sex education, contraception, and so on and so forth.
As I’m sure you know, PP facilities not only consist of killing rooms, but they also have general exam rooms, mammography equipment, and so on. That government money can be used to pay for everything but a room that is solely dedicated as a baby killing room.
The doctors who work there do not solely perform abortions. Therefore, the money that is used to pay their salaries can come from the government (except the actual period of time when they are doing an abortion). Same with the nurses, same with the administrative staff.
So let us say that it cost $1,000,000 to build a PP in a poor neighborhood in Dallas. The equipment used to perform the abortion may cost $100k. That would come from the Gates Foundation grant. The remaining $900k could come from the government grant. If the government grant wasn’t there, all $1,000,000 would have to come from the Gates Foundation.
The abortionist (a licensed OBGYN, hopefully) gets paid $100 an hour, again, hypothetically. Let us then say he performs 8 abortions a day and the actual time he is in the room doing the abortion is 10 minutes (the prep work can be done by a lower paid staff member). So that is 80 minutes of time during the day ($133 per day) that he charges to money that comes from the Gates foundation. The remainder of the hours ($667) he charges to money that comes from the government. If the government money wasn’t there, he’d have to charge all 480 minutes of time during his work day to the Gates Foundation money and it would dry up a whole lot faster.
The same thing applies to the Komen money, but on a far smaller scale.
The point is that less controversial procedures and services can be paid using the restricted money, such as that provided from the government, Komen, and other sources, reserving the unrestricted money from places like the Gates Foundation for the actual direct costs of providing abortion.
I realize that this will not be good enough for you. I realize that you will need to have a notarized report from an independent auditing agency tracking exact charge codes and the flows of each individual serialized dollar. But, then again, that likewise would probably not be good enough for you either.
One other thought: if you have ever worked in a line of work where you had to charge your labor hours to different charge codes corresponding to different clients’ accounts, you should be able to have an intuitive understanding of the above.
