An August report connects 63 Catholic colleges and universities to Planned Parenthood, according to a nonprofit promoting faithfulness in Catholic education.
Any medical referral, job referral, former faculty involvement or honor constitutes a connection, according to the report from the Cardinal Newman Society. The group’s 2011 report connected 150 Catholic colleges to Planned Parenthood, but the numbers dropped a month later after many universities tried to cover up the scandal.
“Many colleges responded by deleting, moving, or hiding the online evidence of scandal,” the report states. “We have ample reason to believe that ongoing associations with the abortion giant have been scrubbed from many Catholic college websites since our 2011 report.”
Georgetown University, a Catholic, Jesuit University, has been connected to Planned Parenthood on 12 separate accounts, according to the report. At Georgetown alone, six faculty members were previously employed by Planned Parenthood, including Zoe Segal-Reichlin, who works full-time as associate general counsel of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Craig Klugman, incoming chairman of health sciences at DePaul University, publicly defended Planned Parenthood’s disbursement of aborted fetal parts on his blog, which was later reposted by Georgetown University’s Bioethics Research Library.
Klugman called the recent Planned Parenthood controversy “a legal and (debatably) ethical enterprise” with “the intent of saving lives and improving the quality of life.”
And Kate Pew Wolters, a director on the Aquinas College Foundation Board, helped direct $296,000 to Planned Parenthood as a chairman of the Steelcase Foundation and president of the Kate and Richard Wolters foundation, according to the 2015 report.
“Any relationship to Planned Parenthood endangers students who may develop a sense of comfort with an organization that destroys innocent lives, ruins souls, and plays a leading role in the demise of American culture,” the report states.