Planned Parenthood Cuts Ties to Companies That Profit from Gaza War

Plus, Florida Jewish schools see an enrollment boom

Planned Parenthood of Northern New England took to social media to announce it would “reject companies who profit from the manufacturing of weapons.”

Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, which describes itself as “The largest sexual and reproductive health care provider…across Maine, New Hampshire, & Vermont,” announced a new “weapons exclusion” in its investment portfolio, “so there is no longer the potential to earn interest from companies that profit from violence and war, such as the devastating loss of life and sexual & gender-based violence happening in Gaza.” 

A follow-up post said the policy “allows us to reject companies who profit from the manufacturing of weapons.” The follow-up post also condemned violence “committed against civilians of any creed or nationality, including Israeli and Palestinian civilians.”

The activist demands to divest from Israel or to boycott or sanction it have frequently transformed nowadays to demands to divest from arms manufacturers that are making the weapons Israel is using to fight Hamas in Gaza. I find such demands naïve and morally mistaken. For one thing, the weapons manufacturers aren’t going to go out of business because Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, or other ideologically aligned nonprofits and individual investors, decide to divest. The profits will still exist, they’ll just go to other causes. For another thing, without weapons to defend itself from the terrorists, Israel would be overrun by enemies that would kill and rape lots of Jews and install a cruel, unfree regime like the Hamas one that ruled Gaza from 2007 to 2023, or like the one that has ruled Iran since 1979.

Planned Parenthood can divest from the American or European arms manufacturers, but the Russians, Chinese Communists, and Iranians will still be making weapons. How was the Union supposed to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War, or how were the Allies supposed to defeat the Nazis in World War II, without weapons? How is Ukraine supposed to fend off Russia? How are the police supposed to capture and arrest violent criminals without weapons?  

The reference to “profit” is another example of how the war against the Jews is also a war against capitalism. They’re against the profits as much as they are against the weapons. It’s almost as if they’d feel better if the weapons manufacturers were structured as charities or as government agencies. Yet for-profit companies pay taxes and are subject to market discipline, while non-profits benefit from tax-exemptions and government agencies are funded by taxpayers. So it’s not clear that taking the profits out of the picture would materially affect or improve the moral questions. The potential profits create incentives to make sure the quality and supply of weapons match the national security and defense needs.

Many hundreds of billions of dollars are now being invested with environmental, social, and governance, or “ESG” screens, and some of them screen out military weapons manufacturers along the lines of the Planned Parenthood of Northern New England policy. From an investment point of view, it’s an opportunity for the rest of us to snap up shares of profitable companies that other people are foolishly selling for non-economic reasons. From a cultural point of view, you’ve got to wonder about the educational system that produced the board and executives that made the decision, and the media landscape that informed it. How would Planned Parenthood of Northern New England propose that Americans and our allies defend ourselves? With cross-country ski poles?