Girl Scouts are selling Cookies, not abortion - The Cookiecott - Robin Marty - POLITICO Magazine
Launched in 1912, the Girl Scouts of the USA started as a single pack of girls in Savannah, Georgia, meeting in the hopes of getting out of their “isolated home environments and into community service and the open air.” Founder Juliette Gordon Low, an artist and athlete, saw her personal mission in launching the troop as “to go on with my heart and soul, devoting all my energies to Girl Scouts, and heart and hand with them, we will make our lives and the lives of the future girls happy, healthy and holy.”
Since that first troop, tens of millions of girls have joined the scouts, forming friendships, earning badges for new skills and, of course, selling the Girl Scout cookies so ubiquitously linked in every person’s mind with the organization. Beginning in 1917, when the first cookies were sold by an Oklahoma troop in a local high school as a service project, troops now sell approximately 200 million boxes per year, resulting in around $700 million in sales.
It’s through these cookie sales that anti-abortion groups are making their voices heard. Dubbing their effort “cookie-cott,” abortion opponents have been urging allies to refuse to purchase cookies from any girl scout this year to show their opposition to what they perceive as the Girl Scouts’ increasing support of people and advocacy groupswith ties, however tendentious, to abortion.