The Inconvenient Truth about #GivingTuesday

May 5 is #GivingTuesdayNow, a day to donate to non-profits in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. #GivingTuesdayNow is the brainchild of the Giving Tuesday Foundation, which was created in 2012 as part of the United Nations Foundation. In 2019, Giving Tuesday was launched as its own foundation, headed up by its co-founder—Planned Parenthood supporter Asha Curran.

Full disclosure: I sent out a Giving Tuesday email on behalf of Life Legal last year and in 2017. I am ashamed to say I did not thoroughly investigate the organization…until today. What I learned is deeply disturbing.

First—and this is not surprising—the UN Foundation that birthed Giving Tuesday is unabashedly pro-abortion. When President Trump initiated the “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” policy, which stripped taxpayer funding from foreign NGOs that provide or advocate for abortion, then UN Foundation President and CEO Kathy Calvin went apoplectic. She said women would “lose access to life-saving services.”

The UN Foundation exists to raise awareness of the “critical role” of the United Nations. This is the same UN whose Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights said that pro-lifers are “part of an “extremist hate campaign” because “denying women the right to abortion care is tantamount to torture.” So there’s that.

But it’s not just that Giving Tuesday was spun out of an organization with a militant anti-life agenda, Giving Tuesday itself is saturated with pro-abortion ideology. Its board is comprised of notable pro-aborts.

Board Member Shijuade Kadree, Chief Advocacy Officer of the LGBT Community Center, applauded New York’s passage of legislation that allows the murder of babies not only through all nine months of pregnancy but even in cases where infants are born alive during an abortion. 

Board Member Hilary Pennington is Executive VP of Program for the Ford Foundation, which brought on former PP President Cecile Richards to secure global abortion rights. The Ford Foundation called New York’s Reproductive Rights law a “landmark win.”

Board Member Jonathan Soros, son of billionaire George Soros, has given millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood’s Super PAC, which exists solely to fund rabidly pro-abortion candidates.

Giving Tuesday Founder and CEO Asha Curran is “deeply, passionately loyal to Planned Parenthood because its absence would be a disaster and a tragedy for so many.” 

I apologize for having used the Giving Tuesday hashtag in the past. Of course, we are always grateful for your support, but we will not be making a “Giving Tuesday” appeal today or at any time in the future.

Note: I want to make it clear that no money raised through the #GivingTuesday campaign goes to the Giving Tuesday Foundation. Still, Giving Tuesday has created a global movement and we’re not sure how the organization will wield its considerable influence in the future, given the radical pro-abortion ideology of its CEO and most of its directors. For this reason we do not want to legitimize the movement in any way.