April 18, 2011

This weekend, following the disappointment of still having the federal government open for business as usual, the WaPo published an opinion piece by Ezra Klein, Washington Post: What Planned Parenthood Really Does, their “domestic policy and economy” guru. One of the “sticking points” in the budget deal concerned defunding Planned Parenthood. Here is the meat of his argument:

“…abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities. That’s less than cancer screening and prevention (16 percent), STD testing for both men and women (35 percent), and contraception (also 35 percent). About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s users are over age 20, and 75 percent have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. It’s also worth noting that federal law already forbids Planned Parenthood from using the funds it receives from the government for abortions.

So though the fight over Planned Parenthood might be about abortion, Planned Parenthood itself isn’t about abortion. It’s primarily about contraception and reproductive health.”

What an incredible set of strawmen! The guy is a master.

First, let me point out that Planned Parenthood is not a monopoly, despite efforts to make it so by many in Congress and elsewhere. Where allowed, there are dozens of alternatives (competitors) to PP that offer women’s health and “reproductive health” services, including the oft-maligned and usually religiously-based pregnancy-crisis centers, and many (or most) serve the poorer segments of the population who do not have their own family physicians. For most women, though, their family physician (usually a general practitioner or “family practice specialist” provides “women’s health services” – which really are not so esoteric that the same person or clinic can’t care for women as well as men.

Notice how he calls the patients or clients of PP “users” – implying that PP is just a tool (of self-empowerment, perhaps?) and apparently denying the very same relationship that he spends the previous paragraph boasting about. We don’t call the people who go to an urgent-care clinic or a neighborhood health clinic “users” – we call them patients. But not PP!

Next, and more to the point, he claims that since PP’s activities (and presumably, budget) include only 3 percent abortion services, PP “isn’t about abortion.”Hmmm. For many years, the Army only had about 3% of its manpower assigned in front-line combat units, the “teeth,” while everyone else was in support roles. And in those years when we weren’t at war (there were a lot of them, believe it or not, back in those pre-Bloody Tuesday (9-11) days), the Army didn’t actually spend ANY money on real combat. Guess the Army isn’t about combat and war. I suspect that your typical contract killer doesn’t really actually KILL someone all that often, but let’s say they whack someone once a month. And how long does the actual killing take? An hour? Out of a standard 2,050 hour “work-year,” then, the hit-man spends less than 1 percent of his time actually killing: I guess being a hit-man isn’t really about killing, after all.

Let us say that Ezra’s facts are accurate, even if his interpretation is skewed. PP really prevents 220,000 abortions a year? That’s good, but at the same time, its February 2011 report reports that in 2009 (latest year for which data was available), its affiliates performed 332,278 abortions, or 50% more than it “prevented.” But PP “isn’t about abortions.” He says that it “prevented” more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies, but I wonder just how it did that, and knows it did that? It gave (or sold) that many condoms, perhaps? Provided the Pill for women and counted the number of times they had sex during their monthly fertile period that they would have otherwise been unprotected? Even PP admits (same report) that it provides more than 27 percent of the more than 1.2 million abortions (surgical and drug) in the US each year.

His final argument is that law already forbids PP from using taxpayer money for abortions. Right. Let them play all the accounting games that they want, but this has always been a bogus argument for PP and virtually ANY government or other criminal organization. An organization’s money is its money. And profit is profit: whether the actual money paying for a service came from a foundation or a government agency or a “user.”

Planned Parenthood is no friend to children – or to women; no matter what it is all about. Don’t believe mainstream media lies.