Compare and Contrast

I've noticed a striking difference in the reactions of pro-"choice"ers for two different stories lately.

Senario 1:
Part I:
A family trying to force a teenage girl to abort.
Part II:
A mentally ill woman dead-set against abortion because of a previous abortion that left her traumatized, and a judge ruling that she should be forced to abort (because it's in her best interests).

Reaction of pro-"choice" Side to Senario 1:

(By the way, since you're probably worried about that teenage girl and that mentally ill woman, know that as far as I know the family has not yet been able to force the girl to abort, and the judge's decision was later revoked.)

Senario 2:
The Susan G. Komen foundation announces changes in policies that will give grants to organizations that directly help with breast cancer research and screenings, and thus inadvertantly cuts off 5% of a certain organization known as "Planned Parenthood"'s yearly profits (yes, PROFITS), since said organization does not do any breast cancer research and merely provides referals for mammograms and performs the "manual" breast exams (that I do on myself in the shower) and then charges for it (yeah, really non-profit and helpful to poor women, isn't it?).

Reaction of pro-"choice" side to Senario 2:

Nuuuuuuuu!!

And then:

Waaahh! Need emergency donations to replace Komen! (Ignore our fat annual surpluses.)

Do you smell that? Methinks 'tis the scent of hypocricy. It's funny. All the pro-aborts complained that Komen broke ties with Planned Parenthood because of political pressure from anti-choicers. But then Komen joined back up with Planned Parenthood a week later because of all the pressure from the pro-aborts. Which sounds more like giving in to political pressure: making a perfectly logical choice with off-the-radar complaints (since the mainstream media pretty much never covers the pro-life side, so as to convince everybody that we're a pro-abortion country), or reversing that perfectly logical choice when barraged with pro-abortion complaints, hacks, and downright nastiness? Which, naturally, was all covered extensively by the media (minus the hacks and nastiness).
By the way, here's what the media DIDN'T tell you: thousands of pro-lifers rallied behind Komen after this decision. Their donation income increased 100%. They recieved thousands of emails from pro-lifers thanking them for this decision (I was one of them) and encouraging comments on their Facebook page (I was also one of them).

Good grief.

(This is actually an optomistic post. I'm hoping that this wasn't a scheme by Planned Parenthood and Komen to increase both of their donations. They both made an incredible amount of money from this. Rather convenient, isn't it?)

How bad can it get?

Hello. We're from Planned Parenthood. We're here to help.

It's no secret that I do my best not to make assumptions. It can be pretty embarassing if you're proven false. What's worse, you can spread false rumors. I may not post about a topic flying around larger, more prominent pro-life blogs if I see a good indicator that it may not be completely true. So here I am, deciding to make a significant claim:

Planned Parenthood is not pro-choice.

I'm not saying that all of the people working at PP aren't pro-choice. But as a whole, PP is not pro-choice. It's pro-abortion, anti-family, possibly racist, and pro-profit. I'm even having a hard time believeing that the PP "biggies", like Cecile Richards, blindly believe themselves to be pro-choice.

Some stories have begun coming out about PP experiences that were very much non-pro-choice.

"Addison's" story:

“Do you want to have an abortion if you’re pregnant?” When Addison told her no, the woman said:  

“Well, you are only seventeen. You really need to make sure you’re ready for parenting and consider abortion."

But Addison was opposed to abortion, and it had ever even occurred to her to consider abortion.

When they called later to confirm she was pregnant, they said, “We know you said you didn't want an abortion in your visit today, but we wanted to make sure that is still the case?"

“I said I did not want an abortion and hung up.” Addison says. But she called back for help. "The same day I called them and told them that I had a blood test and it confirmed pregnancy, and I needed to see if I could see a doctor about prenatal care and what I could and couldn't do, and what would keep the baby healthy. They then told me that unless I had a sexually transmitted disease or wanted an abortion that they could no longer help me. I said so y'all do not help pregnant women? They told me no that they didn't have doctors for pregnant women."

What??

Alisha's story:

[T]he nurse asked her if she wanted to keep “it” if she was pregnant. When Alisha insisted she did, the nurse pushed:

We Can Do It?

“You can be honest with me, are being forced to keep it against your will?” I said, “Absolutely not. I wasn’t expecting to get pregnant so quickly, but if I am pregnant I want to keep my baby” and again she asked “So your husband or mom are not forcing you to keep it if you are?” I said, more aggressively and upset, “NO!”

Alisha notes:

When she was asking me if I was forced to keep the baby she looked like she was reading from a script. I remember her saying that if I kept ” it,” it would be very expensive and life changing. She was poking at the fact that I didn’t seem like I could afford to have a baby. She also asked if I was scared to say that I wanted an abortion, and that if I had any questions I could talk to someone that can ease my nerves. She never really said baby she said “it” a lot. She also mentioned that if I was pregnant depending how far a long I was that there might not even be a heartbeat.

Go here for even more stories.

Have you noticed that women are smart enough to make their own choices UNLESS they decide to keep their baby? How interesting. If an organization only supports pregnant women wanting abortions and then dumps them if the women want to keep their babies, they don't support planned parenthood: they support termination of unplanned parenthood. Guess what? Termination of unplanned parenthood is where the money is.

It doesn't end there. In 1969, the government asked Planned Parenthood for suggestions on how to deal with overpopulation (which, by the way, does not exist). Well, they gave it. Here is the memo in its entirety. Please read it. It is one page long. It will not be boring. Why? Because it is SCARY. Not because Planned Parenthood suggested these things. But because these things are happening. These things are becoming everyday life. Their suggestions include both economic changes and changes to our society as a whole. For example: "encourage women to work", "abortion and contraception on demand", and "tax married more than single". And guess what comes next: "compulsory sterilization of all who have two children except for a few who would be allowed to have three".

Oh great. I don't want to live in China.2, Planned Parenthood, thank you very much.

Fetal Murder: Abortion Contradiction

I feel rather proud of my new state this week. I saw an article in the newspaper this morning about a law, passed earlier this year, that comes into effect today. Be careful. Now, if you kill a pregnant woman in North Carolina, you can be prosecuted for two murders. Or, if you assault a pregnant woman and the unborn child dies because of it, you can be charged with the murder of the child.

This law has many good aspects to it.
1. It will help protect pregnant women from assault. Many pregnant women are abused by their partners if the women refuse to abort. This law will make their abusers think twice before hurting the mother.
2. The woman's friends and family can get justice not only for the death of their sister or daughter, but also for the death of their niece/newphew or daughter/son. Or if it's just the child that dies, the mother can get justice.
3. This law promotes a culture of life.

Abortion advocates rabidly protest laws like these. It puts them in an awkward position, and they don't like that.

1. They're against violence against women, women should have the right to choose whatever they want and nobody should stop them. Okay, granted. Nothing wrong here.

2. This is more sticky. I have heard abortion advocates say repeatedly that it's all about the choice of the mother. While they don't like to dwell on it, in general they say that the choice of the mother is what gives personhood to the child. If a three-week-old fetus is unwanted, it's a parasite. If a three-week-old fetus is wanted, it's a baby. They have to believe that, or be correctly labled as pro-abortion, not pro-choice. But they'd rather not remind people of this strange situation. This law brings it out into the open.

3. Here's the killer. "We're supportive of a law that would actually help women who are victims," said Carey Pope, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina. "But this particular law that passed in no way addresses the violence against women. The only thing it does is to establish personhood rights." Uh-oh! Uh-oh! Red alert! Personhood rights for unborn children?!? ABSOLUTE PRO-ABORTION NO-NO.

Because this law does do that, indirectly. While it makes the exception of abortion, it offers a glaring contradiction: if you kill a baby that the mother wants, you're a murderer. If you kill a baby that the mother doesn't want, you're a hero.

Huh?

Eventually people have to blink and realize that, wait a minute, the fetus didn't change at all. The only thing that changed was the mother's way of thinking.

Hmmmmm.







This law doesn't even contradict what most abortion advocates claim to believe: that it's the mother's choice that defines personhood. All this law does is make people look that contradiction in the face. That's why abortion advocates are scared of this law. If abortion advocates believe it's wrong (and criminally prosecutable) to force a woman to have an abortion, how is it any different when someone (indirectly as it may be) kills a woman's unborn child? Wait...there isn't a difference.

As I stated above, that this law actually does help women. If I was going to kill or hurt somebody, I'd think twice about it if I realized I could be punished doubly for it. This law also helps protect the women who survive the assault, but their baby doesn't. Punishing the offender won't bring their child back, but it's better than the hurtful alternative: "I'm sorry ma'am, I realize that you feel this man killed your child, but legally your child was a mere fetus, and therefore not a person, and therefore we cannot prosecute this man for the fetus's harm." Oh, thanks. Somebody killed my child and you're going to let him get away with it.

Planned Parenthood also opposes this legislation. So at least two huge pro-"choice" groups here in NC don't like this law: and why? Not because it doesn't protect women (because it does), not because it harms choice (because it doesn't), but because it illustrates how their beliefs make little sense.

(By the way, kudos to North Carolina's House Speaker Pro Tem Dale Folwell for sponsoring, speaking for, and advocating this law! Many thanks, Representative Folwell!)

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

The Deadly Coat-hanger

The picture you see there is one of the symbols of the pro-abortion movement. Here is the basis of their claim:

1. Before abortion was legalized in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, thousands and thousands of women got unsafe, illegal abortions, approximately 200,000 to 1.2 million every year. (Thus the coat-hanger image. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.)

2. Because abortion was so dangerous, 5,000-10,000 women died from abortions every year.

3. When abortion was legalized, there was no need to go to money-grubbing back-alley butchers for abortions: women could now go to licensed medical professionals under safe, sanitary conditions.

4. Thus, thousands of women’s lives were/are saved (because they didn’t die from unsafe abortions).

5. If abortion were made illegal, women would begin dying off like flies again.

6. Conclusion: abortion must remain legal.

In reality, there is little basis for this claim. First, the numbers*:

Women perhaps got 1.2 million illegal abortions every year? Really? Then why, the first year after abortion was made legal, were there only 744,600 abortions performed? Legal abortion doesn’t make women decide to be much more careful about getting pregnant. It makes the opposite occur. And this caused the deaths of 5,000-10,000 women? Actually, in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, there were only 39 deaths from illegal abortions. (They were higher in earlier decades, in the hundreds, but the numbers declined dramatically after antibiotics became widely used.)

It’s disturbing how widespread these false figures are. Planned Parenthood uses them. So does NARAL Pro-Choice America. Prominent pro-abortion organizations. And these figures are false. And it’s likely that a good deal of these people know they are false.

‘“In NARAL (the acronym for the then-National Association for the Reform of Abortion Laws) we generally emphasize the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always 5,000 to 10,000 deaths each year'. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false...But in the `morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?" Said Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL and once the director of the busiest abortion clinic in the Western world. (From Aborting

America, Doubleday, 1979.)’ [Quoted from here.]

Now that we have those fake figures out of the way, let’s do some math. This argument above shouldn’t affect pro-lifers at all. Did women die from unsafe abortions? Yes. (Women actually still die from abortions today.)It is terribly sad, but it isn’t the trump card. Pro-lifers care about life. For both the women and their children.

Assume that 10,000 women would die every year from unsafe abortions if abortion was made illegal again. Assume that the number of illegal abortions would be about the same as it was the first year abortion was legalized: 744,600.

Abortion Illegal: 10,000 + 744,600 = 754,600 deaths.

Abortion Legal: [unknown]** + 1,200,000 = >1,200,000 deaths.

I’ll take the former, please.

*Information gathered from several different websites, trusing that their sources were correct, as I can't look up everything first-hand myself.
**This number is uncertain because usually death causes aren't listed as abortion itself, but the specific thing that killed the woman: the type of infection (that was caused by abortion, though abortion isn't mentioned), for example. I am working on another post that discusses deaths related to abortion.

Here is a short list of websites I gathered information from, since I couldn't link to just one when I had a fact.
WEBSITES:
Georgia Right to Life
Why Can't We Love Them Both?
Physicians For Life
Abort 73

Prominent pro-abortion websites that use the fake figures (I don't like to link to them, but here are easy Google searches that will probably make them come up on top):
Our Bodies Ourselves: The Impact of Illegal Abortion
Lessons From Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?
Before and After Roe National Organization for Women
Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet November 2009 Roe v. Wade Did Not Invent Abortion

Image found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

Yay Government

Birth Control

Perhaps some of you have heard the news the government is now forcing insurance companies to cover, among other things, birth control. Because we “deserve” it. And if you haven’t heard, well…you just did.

Planned Parenthood, no huge surprise here, is celebrating this “victory for women”. Now you can prevent pregnancies (or terminate very early ones with the “morning after” pill) all for free! Yay!

Except for, you know, all the problems with this new rule.

Moral convictions aside, regulations like this are the enemy of Capitalism and small government. Short Economics-In-The-Free-Market lesson: if free birth control was really widely wanted and demanded by The People, eventually one of the insurance companies would latch onto this profit-making idea. “Come to us!” their advertisements would say, “and get free birth control!” Then all the people who wanted free birth control would flock to them. The company would make money, and the people would get free birth control. And (here’s the key) everybody who didn’t want birth control wouldn’t go to that company, wouldn’t be morally compromised by being forced to pay for the others’ free birth control.

Because the insurance companies are greedy, right?

This is why the government made them cover birth control in the first place. Insurance companies want to make money. So if they want to make money, they would add free birth control as one of their benefits and make money.

But they didn’t do this on their own. So obviously free birth control isn’t in terribly high demand. Or they would do it without the government forcing them to.

But the government is also forcing The American People to pay for the free birth control. Because the birth control isn’t free. The insurance companies pay for the birth control. And The People pay the insurance companies. See the connection? The government is forcing The People to pay for something they do not want.

Sounds like the opposite of freedom to me. They're the government. We're The People. We tell them what to do, not the other way around.

Besides that, the federal government shouldn’t be messing around in health care at all. It’s not Constitutional. I thought we wanted our “right to privacy”? Simply put:

Dear Government,

Get out of our lives.

Love (or lack thereof),  

PS: American People, I'd appreciate it if you could vote in my polls over there to the right. Thanks!

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

Pro-Life Book Review: "Unplanned", by Abby Johnson

I have referenced Abby Johnson in multiple blog posts before. In one sentence, she’s a Planned Parenthood director turned pro-life advocate.

Unplanned is about her journey through Planned Parenthood; starting with her volunteering as a college student, finishing with her, the director of a clinic, assisting in an ultrasound-guided abortion on a thirteen-week-old fetus. Eight years working with Planned Parenthood. And then she walked out.

Actually, she ran out. Literally. Not during the abortion procedure, but later, shaken, wondering what to do, wondering if she could continue working with an organization that performed abortions, now that she had seen what abortion really did. She ran out of the building, in tears, got in her car, and drove to the Coalition for Life building: the peaceful pro-life protestors she had been fighting ever since coming to that Planned Parenthood as a volunteer.

Her story is powerful and valuable. She gives an insider’s look on what it’s really like working in an abortion clinic. A Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. She doesn’t sugar-coat her old workplace, but she doesn’t completely bash it either. And that makes it ten times more reliable. She tells the truth. She tells of the old, dear friendships she had with her coworkers. She tells how her bosses, while still saying to the public that Planned Parenthood’s goal is to reduce abortions, ordered her to make her clinic crank out more abortions to get the revenue up. And then, when she protested, how they told her to “get her priorities straight”.

Abortion advocates are afraid of Abby Johnson, and they’re afraid of her book. They pretend they aren’t. They call her the exception. They call her a nutcase. They call her a liar. They say that she was about to get fired because she mishandled confidential information, and that was the only reason she resigned.

A dedicated, compassionate eight-year-long volunteer, worker, director, 2008 “Employee of the Year” not only quits her job but goes to join the people she had been fighting for all of those eight years just because she was afraid of getting fired?

I don’t think so.

Getting down to the technicalities, Abby Johnson wrote this book “with” Cindy Lambert. I don’t know how much Cindy Lambert contributed, or if Cindy Lambert was really mostly the author. However, regardless if Abby wrote most of it or not, the story is still Abby’s, and it’s still powerful. Whoever really wrote it, she did it well. The book is very easy to read, very fascinating, very personal. Abby leaves nothing out. I find the style a little annoying in the first few chapters, where she tells you part of the story, and then at the ends of the chapters she hints at other things that she doesn’t tell you until you are further in. However, this annoying quirk doesn’t last long, and certainly doesn’t disqualify it as a worthwhile read. I’ll illustrate for you how much I liked it.

When I first heard Unplanned was coming out, I was very excited, but the line for it was very long at the library, and I’m the sort of person who doesn’t like to buy books unless she’s read them. (I have, as I like to say, spendaphobia.)

Well, after getting irritated with the wait, I found it at a homeschooler’s convention, flipped through it, and bought it spur of the moment. I started it in the car on the way home (don’t worry, I wasn’t driving) and I read it all the way through that evening, until two or three in the morning.

I put it down for a month or so, then picked it back up, thinking I’d like to flip through it again.

I read it straight through again.

I picked it up a few days ago and pretty much read it straight through once more…but not quite. It was spread out over two days, maybe three, I don’t remember.

I’d like to leave you with a quote from the book.

"Looking back now on that late September day of 2009, I realize how wise God is for not revealing our future to us. Had I known then the firestorm I was about to endure, I might not have had the courage to move forward. As it was, since I didn't know, I wasn't yet looking for courage. I was, however, looking to understand how I found myself in this place--living a lie, spreading a lie, and hurting the ery women I so wanted to help.

And I desperately need to know what to do next.

This is my story."

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

And the Defunding Planned Parenthood Saga Continues...

Before I get into the topic of today’s post, I’d like to give a quick update on Steve Six’s nomination to the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals. The vote has been delayed again because of a letter Kansas Senators Roberts and Moran sent, asking the Senate Judiciary to simply stop considering Six for the nomination. It is not extremely unlikely Six will be nominated. We can’t know for sure because the possibility of him being nominated won’t go away unless President Obama removes his nomination, which I my guess is that this won’t happen until President Obama feels it would be politically damaging not to. I thank Senator Roberts and Senator Moran for publically opposing Six’s nomination, despite complaints from pro-abortion folks. I would especially like to thank Senator Moran. He kept to his opposition even after an angry call from the White House itself. [End sidetrack.]

Now for the real topic of today’s post, which originally wasn’t going to be today’s post, but I just heard about this last night.

Remember the bill that made new requirements for programs to receive Title X funding? Namely, that the organizations should offer “full service”; meaning, they would need to do primary and preventative Family Planning care to receive funding. The bill passed. Well, Planned Parenthood (PP) promptly sued for discrimination, claiming that the bill was aimed at them so they would no longer be able to receive funding form Title X, since PP pretty much only does reproductive care. And U.S. Judge J. Thomas Marten ordered a temporary injunction. Which basically means that Kansas PP may not lose their funding.

Naturally, we pro-lifers were ecstatic that PP would be defunded. Why wouldn’t we? PP performs 25% of all abortions nationwide. But the idea that it was aimed only at PP is preposterous. PP was never mentioned in the bill. PP isn’t the only organization that will be defunded by this bill. There are approximately eighty other health clinics in Kansas that the funding would shift to: clinics that give more well-rounded care, including things that PP claims women would lose if PP were defunded.

PP claims that this bill is about abortion. Well, sure, it partly is, in spirit, so to speak. I won’t deny that. But it’s also about giving funds from non-law-breaking and more worthy, more well-rounded health clinics. And actually, let me point something out to you: IT IS AGAINST THE LAW TO USE TITLE X FUNDING FOR PROGRAMS THAT USE ABORTION AS PART OF FAMILY PLANNING.

Also, PP just contradicted itself: did anybody else catch that? PP claims that their funding doesn’t go towards abortions. Yet they’re saying that pro-lifers are rooting for this bill so that PP will be defunded because they perform abortions. But if defunding wouldn’t have an effect on abortions, why are they using this argument? Hmm.

Actually, let me give you a broader picture of PP. PP is about abortions. Period. That’s where the money is. If PP’s funding is taken away, they’ll be exposed as the abortion mill they are.

PP in New Hampshire was defunded recently, losing $1.8 million in funds. They promptly began to cut back on providing birth control pills and other contraceptives for all of their clinics, and “other services provided by Planned Parenthood, including pelvic exams, were also in peril”. But three out of the six New Hampshire’s PP clinics will still perform abortions. If PP is really about “preventative care”, and they claim birth control will prevent abortions (not true, but I can write a post on that later), then why do they cut back on birth control first?

So, in theory, perhaps the funding really isn’t used for abortion: they need the funding so they don’t have to dip into their own profits (Which was 63.4 million during 2008-2009) to keep up the appearance of simply being a reproductive health organization. But that’s virtually still the same thing. If they don’t keep up appearances, they’ll lose their funding, because without those appearances, they’re an abortion clinic with Title X funding (which, I repeat, is AGAINST THE LAW), not a family planning reproductive health clinic, and they would then lose their funding from Title X anyway. It’s a circle.

And I would just like to mention that PP is lying when they say poor women will lose affordable care. (look here, near the end, starting with "Kathy Ostrowski of Kansans for Life described to LifeNews how the budget provision works.") The point of this bill is that Title X money would go to fund more services than PP provides, meaning that poor women would actually have just as much access to more kinds of care. This bill doesn’t take money away from poor women. It just redistributes it to different, better places. I repeat, this is the point of this bill.

Here is a link to an excellent article by the Susan B. Anthony List. It lists all of the main reasons for defunding PP. I encourage you to read it; it’s fairly short.

Myths of Planned Parenthood

I’m sure most of the country has noticed at least a little bit of the hype surrounding Planned Parenthood (PP). I posted about them a little over a week ago about threats from the federal level towards a state that de-funded their PP.

Why should PP be de-funded? There are two main reasons. PP has cheated on the government multiple times, over-charging it for mislabeled services in order to get more money. As some undercover videos have shown, they also are willing to aid and abet sex traffickers and men taking advantage of underage girls, instead of reporting it like they’re supposed to. It doesn’t make sense for us to fund a company that breaks laws. The second reason is that they perform abortions. They’re the largest abortion provider in the US. PP has created several “reasons” why de-funding them is ludicrous. (I have yet to hear PP addressing the monetary fraud issue.)

Myth #1: “Only 3% of our business is abortions.”

PP has created its own twisted way to count their services that would be viewed as completely ridiculous if another business did it. An excellent article from Live Action gave an example of this. Paraphrasing, there is a company that makes airplanes, but also makes spare parts for airplanes, some of those parts costing as little as $0.25. Selling airplanes is the company’s main business, profit-wise. About 99% of their business is airplanes, and 1% is all the spare parts. This is how the normal business world operates. However, this company sells many more little parts than airplanes. So, PP style, 99% of their business is little spare parts, and 1% is selling airplanes. One spare part = one airplane, which, frankly, is ridiculous. Their business doesn’t revolve around spare parts. It revolves around airplanes.

So in PP, one box of contraceptive pills = one abortion, which is also ridiculous. Looking at it profit-wise from PP’s own report (I’m aware this report is an old one, my apologies, the new one doesn’t include profits, but the percentages are roughly the same), abortion is actually 36% of their business. This is a far cry from 3%.

Myth #2: “None of the taxpayer/government money is used for abortions.”

This argument has never made sense to me. Glenn Beck gave a good example of this strange way of thinking. Again paraphrasing, let’s say there’s a business that does torture. Naturally, nobody likes torture. “Don’t worry!” the business says, “We won’t use your money to fund the actual torture.” Okay, great. Instead your money goes to pay for the lighting, the floors, the cleaning supplies, the exam tables. Now, are you helping fund torture or not? PP will simply use your money instead of their own money to pay for less massive things, and use their own money, which you saved them, to pay for the abortions. It’s all the same thing.

Myth #3: “Women will lose life-saving services if you de-fund us.”

For the most part, this is not true. The money that used to go to PP will instead to go other charitable health clinics…that don’t perform abortions. In Indiana, Governor Daniels said during the time that they de-funded PP, “[I have] commissioned a careful review of access to services across the state and can confirm that all non-abortion services, whether family planning or basic women’s health, will remain readily available in every one of our 92 counties. In addition, I have ordered the Family and Social Services Administration to see that Medicaid recipients receive prompt notice of nearby care options. We will take any actions necessary to ensure that vital medical care is, if anything, more widely available than before.”

Myth #4: “Our goal is to make abortion rare.”

Okay, all the blood-money-hungry suspicions aside, let’s look at this in terms of numbers. Overall, the number of abortions nationally have been declining. This is good, but is it because of PP?

It makes sense that PP’s customers that come for other things would also come to PP for abortions, right? So the number of PP’s customers wanting abortions should be declining, right?

That number is rising.

How to Destroy Your Own Cause: Planned Parenthood and the Obama Administration

After the failed attempt to de-fund Planned Parenthood (PP) nationally in Congress, Indiana made history last May by passing a bill that prevents health care centers that perform abortions from receiving state taxpayer funds. (As of today, Kansas and Texas have done the same.)

PP is a self-described “reproductive health care”* center that performs roughly 25%** of all abortions in the USA. Understandably, PP and its supporters don’t take kindly to even remotely pro-life legislation, and this bill was no exception.

One of PP’s strongest supporters is the Obama Administration. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but what did surprise me is how the Obama Administration reacted to this bill. One of PP’s most cited arguments against being de-funded is that minorities and the poor will lose access to vital, life-saving health care. Assuming they really believe this, you would think PP would protest what the Obama Administration did to attack this bill. After claiming that states don’t have the right to restrict Medicaid on a state level, the Obama Administration is now threatening to cut billions of dollars of Medicaid funding specifically for low income people in Indiana if Indiana doesn’t revoke the bill.

Now, how much sense does this make? PP shouldn’t be de-funded because it helps minorities and poor people, therefore we should cut billions of dollars of funding that helps minorities and poor people? Huh? I can only assume that the Obama Administration is hoping to be able to pin the blame on Indiana, like the childish quip, “I TOLD you I would hit you if you didn’t give me my toy! It’s your own fault! Nyah nyah nyah!” (Never mind that the toy may actually be Indiana’s in the first place.)

I can post in more detail later about the controversy surrounding de-funding PP and PP itself, but this struck me as so outrageously absurd and contradictory to the supposed beliefs of PP and its supporters that I thought it merited a short post all of its own.

*From the Planned Parenthood website.
**For some reason I couldn’t find an abortion estimation in the USA past 2008, so I calculated using what seems about the average, 1.2 million, and Planned Parenthood’s fact sheet from 2010 (page 2).