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?

Florida Jewish school enrollment boom: The Teach Coalition and Step Up For Students today issued a new report outlining the boom in Jewish school enrollment in Florida, fueled by the state’s scholarships of $8,000 a student. The report covers a time span before the scholarships became universally available. It shows student enrollment between 2007-08 and 2022-23 rose 58 percent, to 13,379 from 8,492, while the number of Jewish day schools and yeshivas grew to 74 from 40.

In Massachusetts, where I live, the big challenge Jewish day schools face is finding enough students to fill the existing school buildings. In Florida the big challenge is finding buildings big enough to accommodate all the students. “With Florida’s existing Jewish schools at or near full capacity, more effort is needed to source suitably sized school buildings,” said Danny Aqua, director of special projects at Teach Coalition. “Without legislative and regulatory action to reduce the hurdles to opening new schools, the lack of school building space may throttle growth in Florida’s Jewish day schools.”

The report concludes that families are moving to Florida from New York for the scholarships. “It is logical that the availability of scholarships worth almost $8,000 per student to over half of students would influence the relocation decisions of Jewish school families in New York….when choosing where to move, a Jewish day school family that spends $15,000+ per child out-of-pocket on day school tuition could find an $8,000 per child scholarship quite attractive.” 

Not only that, but there’s warmer weather and zero state income tax. It’ll be interesting to watch over time how this growing and mostly Orthodox Jewish population affects the culture in Florida. There are already plenty of kosher restaurants. I was down there briefly over the winter, in the aftermath of October 7, and I was struck by how many businesses I saw flying Israeli flags. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, you walk around and see Palestinian flags. In Sunny Isles Beach, you walk around and see Israeli flags. There are exceptions, of course, and there are plenty of American flags, too, in both places. 

Some people will look at this and see a welfare magnet, no different from migrants coming to America to get free public school and medical care. I see it a bit differently, as the private school students are still saving the state money, because the $8,000 scholarship is still less than the full, all-in cost of public school. In Florida in 2022, that was $11,076 just in “current spending,” which undercounts capital costs, pension costs, and retiree health benefits. Look at it that way, and it’s not so much welfare, but just modestly leveling the playing field. 

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, is in the Sunday New York Times warning about a vast “spiritual crisis.” He seems to think the solution is “sectorwide collective bargaining,” “establishing a clear preference for local ownership, local industry” and “an expansion of antimonopoly efforts.” Maybe supporting religious schools, or at least giving them a more even playing field against religion-free alternatives, is a government policy that would more directly address the crisis Murphy is talking about.

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