Planned Parenthood, the Pro-Lifer's Friend

[Some of this material appeared previously as a comment. Don't tell me you never do that.]

Whether or not you think that Planned Parenthood has, at great risk to their credibility, completely manufactured an outrageous story designed to motivate congressional action against a perceived threat (obviously thinking that the Great American Free Press would let them get away with it), there's good, solid evidence that the threat posed by Crisis Pregnancy Centers is for real:

Low-income Texas women and families need access to basic health care and pregnancy prevention services, not access to biased counseling at crisis pregnancy centers. It is irresponsible to take scarce taxpayer dollars away from pregnancy prevention and health care and divert it to unlicensed, biased, non-medical counseling. We hope these materials help Texans better understand this hidden threat to the health needs of Texas women and families.

Yes, that's right. Funding CPC's means taking money away from people who actually provide basic medical care to people who will probably not otherwise get it. Contrary to popular belief, Planned Parenthood does occasionally manage to make time in their busy schedule of condemning their everlasting souls to a literal and eternal hell to do a few good works--like averting 617,000 unintended pregnancies (which amounts to about 300,000 prevented abortions) each year.

What the hell is up with these anti-Planned Parenthood Jihadists? Huh?

I mean, I will give you the fact that Doctors at Planned Parenthood terminate a lot of pregnancies. And I understand that there are a lot of people who are passionately anti-abortion. I get that. But here's what I don't get--why is the following statement so incredibly hard for folks to understand:

"If you people would get the fuck out of Planned Parenthood's way and let them do their work, they would prevent millions of abortions a year, instead of just hundreds of thousands."

Serious. Yes, Doctors at Planned Parenthood terminate pregnancies. They perform abortions. If you want to call it that (which doesn't even begin to make it true), they "kill babies."

But have the jihadists ever stopped for a second to think about what else they do? Considering that Planned Parenthood serves some five million people a year (three-quarters of whom are above the age of 19), and only Nine Percent receive abortion services, has it never crossed their minds to wonder exactly what the fuck are they doing for they other four million, five hundred and fifty thousand people?

Oh, just a few basic things that the jihadists apparently wouldn't mind seeing banished from the face of the earth--or at least made unavailable to anyone who isn't lucky enough to be able to pay for them out of their own pocket:*

• family planning, counseling and birth control
• pregnancy testing and counseling
• gynecological care, Pap tests, breast exams
• emergency contraception
• HIV testing and counseling
• medically accurate sexuality education
• screening and treatment for sexually transmitted infections
• infertility screening and counseling
• voluntary sterilization for women and men
• reproductive medical exams for men
• safer sex counseling
• midlife services
• prenatal care
• adoption referrals
• primary care
• referrals for specialized care

Nah, we don't need any of that stuff, do we?

Look. Even if you hate abortion with every fiber of your being, please consider this--for every blow you strike against the abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood, you are striking Nine against all of the above services--services that people desperately need to, among other things, keep from getting pregnant in the first place. This is the political equivalent of a cluster bomb in a crowded city--sure, you're hitting you're target. But 91% of the destruction is falling on the innocent.


If all the anti-Planned Parenthood jihadists believed for one minute the old saw about "love the sinner but hate the sin," then they would be loving the living fuck out of Planned Parenthood right about now. If you're against abortion, the folks at Planned Parenthood are your goddamn front-line motherfucking troops.

I know that sounds paradoxical, but think about it. If your agenda is to reduce the number of abortions in this country, then there's probably little you could do that would be better than putting Planned Parenthood in charge of a huge fucking budget and telling them, "Unplanned Pregnancy: Seek and Destroy."

Because Planned Parenthood is about just that: actually planning when to become a parent. And that is something that we, as a nation, are not real good at. About half of the pregnancies in this country each year are unplanned. People--that's a fucking 50% failure rate! About the only thing we do less successfully than that is creating peace by invading other countries.

And this is not rocket science. This is about a) knowing where babies come from and how, b) knowing how to use contraception, c) having access to contraception, and d) not believing that using contraception will condemn you to a literal and eternal hell.

Well guess the fuck what: in at half the pregnancies in this country annually, at least one person has failed in at least one of those areas. But here's the good news: Planned Parenthood works hard in all four of those areas.

So, I've asked this question before, and I'll ask it again (now that I know I've got at least one anti-choice reader): if an abortion is such a terrible thing that you would recommend almost anything to prevent it, up to and including harassing women who are seeking abortion and imprisoning doctors who perform them, why can't you get behind the much simpler (and more widely accepted) practices of teaching accurate sex-ed, making contraceptives widely available, and de-stigmatizing contraceptive use?

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*and no, I don't just mean "pay the co-pays and deductibles out of their own pockets." I mean "pay the whole fucking bill out of their own pockets." The anti-choice Jihadists want to let insurance companies quit paying for all sorts of reproductive health care--but we wouldn't know about that if Planned Parenthood didn't tell us, now would we?