Why would a billionaire couple who funds the abortion industry be ashamed of it? It’s not an easy question to answer. After all, liberals frequently spend enormous resources and political capital to promote abortion and attack anyone who supports the right to life. However, one particular billionaire couple seems to be trying to hide their support for abortion.
They are Laura and John Arnold, the husband and wife in charge of the Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The Arnold Foundation has given away more than $1 billion since 2011 to fund a wide array of leftist initiatives. One area to which the Arnolds have been particularly keen to give is the abortion industrial complex.
Thanks to great research compiled by 2ndVote, we know that the Arnold Foundation has donated to the following groups: Planned Parenthood Action Fund (between $5 and $10 million), Planned Parenthood Federation Of America Inc. (between $5 and $10 million), Center For Reproductive Rights (between $1 and $5 million), Guttmacher Institute, Inc. (between $1 and $5 million), Planned Parenthood Texas Votes ($100,000 and $500,000), and the National Network Of Abortion Funds ($50,000 and $100,000).
Now, the Arnolds aren’t hiding their foundation’s giving to the abortion mill. However, after they started to gain notoriety for backing liberal politicians and far-left advocacy organizations, an interesting thing happened. It appears that the Arnolds attempted to scrub their personal giving from the internet. But, like an elephant, the internet never forgets.
A little bit of research on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine reveals a now defunct website, lauraandjohnarnold.com, where the Arnolds listed their foundation’s giving as well as their personal contributions. There we find that Planned Parenthood Action Fund is one of the top recipients of the Arnolds’ personal largesse. The Arnolds gave Planned Parenthood’s political army somewhere between $5 and $10 million between 2015 and 2017.
Leftists often moralize about the constitutional “right” to terminate a baby’s life, so why would the Arnolds attempt to erase their personal giving from public view? One answer may lie in the Arnolds’ attempt to style themselves as bipartisan. Work produced by other liberal billionaires such as George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg is instantly tainted by partisanship. The Arnolds are perhaps working diligently to avoid the same fate.
The Arnolds want nothing more than to be seen as middle-of-the-road philanthropists. As I recently explained in Investor’s Business Daily:
To hear the Arnolds tell it, they are equal opportunity donors funding initiatives across the ideological spectrum. In what appears to be one of his favorite tweets about himself, [John] Arnold wrote this in March:
‘I’ve now been called the next Koch brother by the far left press and the next George Soros by the far right. I’m an equal opportunity special interest pot stirrer.’
Of that first sentence, no doubt the latter is true. However, the former is not.
This may provide one clue as to why the Arnolds hoped to erase their personal giving history. While it’s true that their foundation gives to some conservative groups (albeit largely to work on bipartisan issues), their personal giving skews far to the left. In other words, their personal giving speaks truth to the lie that the Arnolds are “equal opportunity special interest pot stirrers.”
If they were truly bipartisan, their personal giving would reflect that. It simply doesn’t, so they are trying to hide it. But the cat’s out of the bag.
Let’s also not forget some very real facts about the racial elements of the Planned Parenthood story, so we can all be clear on what kind of organization is the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, who leaked her true intentions when she wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” To this day, Planned Parenthood is criticized for putting its offices in urban centers with high African-American populations. This is potentially one of the reasons that “black babies are aborted in America three times more often than white babies, and Hispanic preborns are killed 1½ times more often than whites.”
These racial divides have gotten so out of hand that today more black babies are aborted in New York City than those born alive, The Wall Street Journal reported: “According to a city Health Department report released in May [2018], between 2012 and 2016 black mothers terminated 136,426 pregnancies and gave birth to 118,127 babies. By contrast, births far surpassed abortions among whites, Asians, and Hispanics.”
Progressive talking heads go ballistic whenever conservatives suggest that taxpayers should stop subsidizing Planned Parenthood. But with billionaires such as John and Laura Arnold filling the coffers, it’s fair to ask why the rest of us should be forced to underwrite the abortion industrial complex.
