America's leading physician-assisted suicide advocacy group has tapped a Planned Parenthood of Illinois board member to help lead the organization.
Compassion & Choices named Jill Gordon, CEO of children's hair salon company KidSnips, to its board of directors on Thursday. Gordon has donated tens of thousands of dollars to both Planned Parenthood and Compassion & Choices through her foundation, the Jill and Bradford Gordon Family Foundation. Gordon told the Washington Free Beacon the issue of assisted suicide is "close to my heart."
"Baby boomers like me are leading the end-of-life care movement because we have challenged the status quo our entire lives," Gordon said.
Rachel MacNair, vice president at the Consistent Life Network, said she is not surprised that a prominent abortion supporter would also become a cheerleader for assisted suicide.
"The connection between killing at both ends of the lifespan has been one that both pro-life and pro-choice advocates have held for a long time," MacNair told the Free Beacon. "For pro-lifers, of course, it's social approval of killing either way and done on similar reasoning. For pro-choicers, it's choice and bodily autonomy either way and done on similar reasoning."
Kim Callinan, president and CEO of Compassion & Choices, told the Free Beacon she added Gordon to the board based on her wide-ranging professional success.
"Compassion & Choices appointed Jill because of her leadership experience as a CEO, an entrepreneur, and nonprofit board member across multiple organizations, not because of her work on a particular issue," Callinan said. "Jill’s past experience with governance, stewardship, and fidelity will help ensure that Compassion & Choices continues our commitment to ensuring that patients have access to the full range of end-of-life care options from pain management to hospice care to medical aid in dying."
KidSnips, Gordon’s company, is the largest provider of children’s haircuts in the Chicago metropolitan area, according to a Compassion & Choices press release. Gordon’s foundation has donated nearly $120,000 to Planned Parenthood affiliated organizations since 2014 and more than $74,000 to Compassion & Choices since 2013, according to Grantmakers.io.
Illinois, where Gordon’s company is based, has some of the most lenient abortion restrictions in the country. Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Act in 2019, which repealed a state ban on partial-birth abortion—in which doctors artificially deliver unborn children before terminating them. The practice is already illegal under federal law, but the line around the partial-birth abortion ban has been blurred in the past. Kermit Gosnell, a former abortion doctor in Pennsylvania, was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder for using scissors to snip the spinal cord of fully delivered babies—a practice that went undetected for decades.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told the Free Beacon he sees a clear relationship between abortion and physician-assisted suicide and believes in the importance of protecting human life from conception to natural death.
"Planned Parenthood and Compassion & Choices share one big thing in common: a disregard for human life," Schilling said. "Both abortion and assisted suicide treat life as something that can and should be cast aside if it appears to have no value. Not coincidentally, they also threaten the most vulnerable of human lives: the unborn and those at the end of life."