I love this clever campaign by Planned Parenthood!

None of you, however, can be happy with Palin's selection, especially on her positions on women's issues. So, if you feel you can't support the Obama campaign financially, may I suggest the following fiendishly brilliant alternative?

Make a donation to Planned Parenthood. In Sarah Palin's name. And here's the good part: when you make a donation to PP in her name, they'll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here's the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

You'll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the "in Sarah Palin's honor" card.

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Have You Seen the "Sarah Palin Planned Parenthood" Email?

Wednesday September 24, 2008

http://womensissues.about.com/b/2008/09/24/have-you-seen-the-sarah-palin-planned-parenthood-email.htm

 

On Saturday, September 20, the letter below arrived in my inbox. I looked at it, thought it was clever, and promptly forgot it.

Apparently, thousands of other women read it carefully and took it seriously enough to do what the letter suggested.

Like the Anne Kilkenny letter, this email has gone viral very quickly. But nobody knows where it originated. Planned Parenthood says it didn't come from them, but they're the unwitting beneficiaries of its call to action. The response has been so enormous that media outlets are reporting on its impact across the country.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

You'll want to read the letter first before you see what others are saying, right? Here it is:

Dear Friends:

We may have thought we wanted a woman on a national political ticket, but the joke has really been on us, hasn't it? Are you as sick in your stomach as I am at the thought of Sarah Palin as Vice President of the United States?

Since Palin gave her speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Vice Presidency, Barack Obama's campaign has raised over $10 million dollars. Some of you may already be supporting the Obama campaign financially; others of you may still be a little honked off over the primaries.

None of you, however, can be happy with Palin's selection, especially on her positions on women's issues. So, if you feel you can't support the Obama campaign financially, may I suggest the following fiendishly brilliant alternative?

Make a donation to Planned Parenthood. In Sarah Palin's name. And here's the good part: when you make a donation to PP in her name, they'll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here's the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

You'll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the "in Sarah Palin's honor" card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202

Feel free to send this along to all your women friends and urge them to do the same.

And that's what a number of women have been doing. Palin's extreme views on abortion (only acceptable when the mother's life is in danger) have prompted many to take action and contribute to their local Planned Parenthood chapters.

According to the Rocky Mountain News in an online article dated earlier today, this has meant a windfall for PP as dollars pour in:

Katie Groke Ellis, field manager for the Planned Parenthood of the Rockies Action Fund, predicts that the five-state chapter of the group alone could draw $100,000 in donations.

"We are so excited to see that people are writing checks to us instead of just complaining about it," Ellis said Tuesday.

Although this email's author is unknown, it was inspired by a woman who's happy to take credit for another similar campaign that predates this one by seven years. Patt Morrison, an LA Times columnist, suggested in January 2001 that readers of her column do the same thing to anti-choice George Bush on President's Day. Writing for the Huffington Post, Morrison describes what happened back then:

Ultimately, more than a million dollars, I was told, was generated for Planned Parenthood in Bush's name. George Bush became one of the biggest money-generators in Planned Parenthood's history. The idea won me an award from Planned Parenthood, and a splash in Ms. Magazine.

So I am delighted that my ''Mother of All Ironic Donations'' notion has been revived for Palin.