David versus Goliaths

Charity: Lone shareholder cuts away at the business-abortion alliance | Rusty Leonard & Warren Cole Smith

Corporate giving to charity is as old as America itself. Benjamin Franklin was a great organizer of charities—including the nation's first volunteer fire department and the first charity hospital. Franklin, one of the richest and most prominent men in America, was also an expert at encouraging other business leaders to "dig deep."

Today, some corporations still "dig deep," but much of their giving goes to organizations that Franklin could not have imagined. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., for example, contributed more than $500,000 to Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest performer of abortions, between 1998 and 2006.

But one man, Tom Strobhar, has spent nearly two decades applying the brakes to this corporate social engineering machine. With shareholder activism, Strobhar has had a hand in changing the corporate giving policies of more than 150 companies, essentially depriving Planned Parenthood of donations that would have totaled multimillions of dollars.