Planned Parenthood ...

Social conservatives in Congress want to make defunding Planned Parenthood a defining moment. They are willing to shut the government down over it. 

For the record, Planned Parenthood gets about $540 million a year in government funds – by far its largest source of income. It can’t use any of that money to provide abortions because of the Hyde Amendment, a point its supporters often make. It does provide abortions, ostensibly funded from other sources, nonetheless, which keeps it in the crosshairs of the pro-life movement.   

The pro-life movement has wanted for years to put Planned Parenthood out of business. Pro-life advocates have picketed Planned Parenthood facilities, pro-life legislators have tried to pass laws making it almost impossible for it to operate, and conservative Republicans have long used the funding of Planned Parenthood as a red meat campaign issue. 

Planned Parenthood has survived all this through wide support from women’s groups, pro-choice groups, and from liberal and well as many moderate legislators in both parties.  Public opinion about Planned Parenthood remained favorable.     

Recently, hidden-camera videos from a pro-life group may have dramatically changed public opinion about what Planned Parenthood does, and how it operates.  

The videos show Planned Parenthood officials talking about how they selectively harvest and sell tissue from aborted fetuses for maximum profit.  Other videos of former employees disclosing details and images of that process are even more disturbing.  

Like many Americans, I am appalled by all of this.  Still, however horrific, what Planned Parenthood is doing is legal; morally and ethically questionable, for sure, but legal. 

As ghastly as they are, the videos have reinvigorated the pro-life movement. It’s made the single largest provider of abortions in the country appear to be run by heartless monsters who see the unborn not as humans, but as a cash crop. Conservative Republicans – especially those campaigning for President – are demonizing Planned Parenthood on a regular basis.

In fairness, Planned Parenthood provides a wide range of routine women’s health services such as screenings for cervical cancer, mammograms, and contraception counseling. The “funding” it receives from the Federal government is mostly in the form of reimbursements for providing these services.  So it’s not as if taxpayers are giving Planned Parenthood a subsidy of more than half a billion dollars; we’re paying it for services the same way we’d pay a hospital or clinic or family doctor through Medicare, Medicaid and the like.   

Abortion services constitute about 3% of its income and taxpayers aren’t funding any of those. Defunding Planned Parenthood means cutting it off from reimbursement for other services it provides and has no impact on its abortion services. It’s pure theatre to appeal to the evangelical and pro-life segments of the population; it’s a politically calculated gambit. 

That said, I believe we should defund Planned Parenthood, for a host of other reasons, not one of which has to do with its role as an abortion provider. 

Abortion – however you feel about it personally – is legal in the country. Under current law as well what Planned Parenthood is doing with aborted fetuses may disgust you, but is not illegal as long as they get informed consent from the mother, which it appears they do. 

No, my opposition to Planned Parenthood is more fundamental: The government should not be funding groups like Planned Parenthood in the first place.

There are better, more effective ways of providing the same services to low-income women than through a politically compromised entity like Planned Parenthood. Community health clinics provide the same low or no-cost services and far outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities.     

Planned Parenthood is just another bloated politically privileged special interest group that depends on friendly politicians – mainly Democrats – to keep the money coming.  As such, it contributes millions to political campaigns.

One report has it spending almost $12 million on recent Presidential campaigns.   

It’s not spending this kind of money without a purpose in mind.  And it’s certainly not because it simply believes in a healthy democracy; its leaders have an agenda and an infrastructure to feed – they need to keep the money rolling in. 

And they do a good job of that. 

There was a time when there weren’t that many providers of free or affordable women’s health services. Planned Parenthood filled the gap. But now with ObamaCare a much broader range of health services for women are covered within the regular medical establishment, including preventative screenings and contraception, at no cost to both the poor and the not-so-poor. 

So what’s the reason for Planned Parenthood anymore? Isn’t it now just another generic service provider since its primary reason for being -- at least the one it likes to herald online, in print and everywhere else – has gone away?   

Or is its real reason for being to be – as it states on its annual report – the leading advocate for ensuring a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion?

If that’s the case, it’s a lobbyist. And lobbyists should get no money from taxpayers, especially if they are simply going to turn around and use those taxpayer dollars to lobby for more.     

However, I suspect Planned Parenthood uses its pro-abortion stance mainly as a fund-raising tool, since abortions are such a minor – and declining – part of its business. The number of abortions in the U.S. has declined dramatically since the early 1990s for a wide range of reasons, not the least of which is greater use of contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies. 

Abortion’s clearly not a growth industry. In fact, some say the rate of abortions is now at its lowest point since 1973. As much as the religious right and politicians like Cruz, Santorum, and others would like to keep abortion first and foremost as a campaign wedge issue, it’s actually an issue that’s going away largely on its own.    

There’s another good reason to defund Planned Parenthood.  Its founder – Margaret Sanger. 

Sanger believed and wrote about the positive aspect of eugenics. She endorsed negative eugenics, which, as one article about her reports, “aims to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered unfit.“

In other words, selective breeding to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.”

Hmmm.  Where have we heard ideas like that before?

Okay, if we are to topple statues of long-dead politicians for their beliefs, and punish organizations today for something their founders stated long, long ago, surely we should defund an organization that had its roots in such hateful ideas. 

Remember the overreaction to Black Lives Matter and the attacks on the Confederate flag and anyone who supported the Confederacy now deemed racist?    

Now think about what the patron saint of Planned Parenthood believed. 

Apparently to her, all lives didn't matter; just the ones she approved of.

Some might say her vision lives on in the organization she founded.