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Planned Parenthood Attack Moves To States

Posted by: Linda Carbonell on April 30, 2011.

04-30-2011 by L. S. Carbonell

Gov. Mitch Daniels

Based on two lies, that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions and that Planned Parenthood uses Federal funds to provide abortions, the Republicans have declared war on Planned Parenthood. Their fringe has even circulated the idea that Margaret Sanger was a communist who advocated abortions for ethnic cleansing. I ran into that one on the Yahoo comment stream yesterday.

The facts: Planned Parenthood provides a secure place for the performance of abortion services in a nation where providing abortions makes one a target for assassination. Only 10% of Planned Parenthood’s service involve abortion. Planned Parenthood maintains a stricter separation of funding than the national Chamber of Commerce, which has been accused of co-mingling foreign donations with domestic ones in their 501c accounts. It is illegal to use Federal funds for abortions and Planned Parenthood obeys the law.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has announced that he will sign a state bill that cuts off Medicaid funding to the 28 Planned Parenthood facilities in the state. Those facilities serve 22,000 poor Indianans who will have no free or low-cost alternatives for things like breast cancer screening, pap smears, birth control and family planning education. Republicans have an irritating habit of believing that the doctors they go to will provide these services at cut rates for the poor, when the poor and seniors have a hard enough time finding doctors who will accept Medicare and Medicaid patients and ob/gyns are leaving the specialization in droves because of high malpractice premiums. They also believe that there are still charity hospitals and readily available free clinics other than those at Planned Parenthood. The jerks at Fox News actually suggested you could get health screenings at Walgreens, prompting the company to issue a statement denying the availability of gynecological services at their pharmacies.

The excuses Republicans are offering about the availability of alternate providers only goes to prove they are totally clueless about the state of health care in this country. The chose to ignore the huge free clinics Keith Olbermann raised funds for last year where thousands received health screenings for the first time in years and hundreds of lives were saved through discovery of treatable, life-threatening conditions.

Indiana’s law is just another front in the battle to eliminate abortions in America. It is grounded in a base falsehood – that making abortions illegal stops abortions. It just makes abortions unsafe. It risks women’s lives and reproductive abilities. It removes medical personal from the decision, eliminating the possibility for women to make informed choices about the state of their pregnancies and the condition of their fetuses. It blocks women from having abortions based on medical necessity to save their lives or medical advisement based on severe malformation of the fetus and makes abortion on demand for birth control the type most available.

Shutting down Planned Parenthood cuts women off from the means and the education to avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place. Education and birth control reduce abortions, not making it illegal.

But this isn’t really about what is best for women. It isn’t about preventing abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancies. It’s about the dual monster of men and religions demanding control of women’s bodies. It’s about that conservative lie that before Roe v. Wade and before the 1960′s there was no pre-marital sex, there were no unwed mothers and Mommies stayed home and raised their babies while Daddies went to their offices. That world never existed. We had hundreds of orphanages in this country filled with the babies of unwed young women. We had hundreds of babies abandoned on trash heaps by unwed mothers. We had hundreds of young women dying from the complications of illegal abortions, many performed by people with little or no medical training.

And we can’t even get accurate statistics. My great-aunt’s death certificate says she died of peritonitis. It was caused when the knitting needle that ended her pregnancy punctured her uterine wall, flooding her abdomen with amniotic fluid and placental blood that turned putrid and toxic. She was 17. It was 1936. Abortion was illegal and her family didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was confessing all at the hospital where they could not save her life. Even then, most of the family never knew the truth. They were too ashamed.

There is a reason Roe v. Wade happened. We had just come through a horrific time when a drug called thalidomide had caused severe birth defects. Some of the babies survived and went on to live productive, if highly restricted lives with no arms or legs. Other babies died shortly after birth. The abortion issue came to the forefront because a few women who had taken the drug went overseas for abortions. We were forced to see what society had chosen to ignore for so long – the history of illegal abortions, the parentage of orphans, the fate of unwed mothers who ended up in prostitution to support their children, the myths we had created to hide the truth from polite society.

Years of listening to the conservatives, the moral majority, the right wing – whatever you want to call these people – has made one thing very apparent to me. They don’t want to deal with the unpleasant realities of life. When they say they want to “take back our country” what they really want is to shove all the unpleasantness back under the rug and restore the American myth of perfect little towns with perfect little nuclear families. They think that if they restore the laws that existed in the 1890′s, they can restore that mythological life.

No one ever asks where the housemaids in Pollyanna went on their day off. I can tell you. They went back to the inner-city slums to see their children for one afternoon a week, back to where those children were being raised by grandmothers. That’s where their measly salaries went, too.

Daniels and the Indiana legislature actually left an escape clause in the law. Daniels statement said “Any organization affected by this provision can resume receiving taxpayer dollars immediately by ceasing or separating its operations that perform abortions.” That’s what Planned Parenthood does. No taxpayer dollars go to their abortion services, but to meet Daniels’ version, they would have to set up separate buildings which would then become targets for everything from protesters to bombers. Daniels’ statement proves that neither he nor the legislature is interested in facts, just the right’s propaganda.

Maybe it’s time for Planned Parenthood to mimic the President – release the long form. Open their books to those who refuse to believe that they separate Federal money from their donated funds for abortion services. It would probably have about as much impact as the Obama long form birth certificate – none at all to those who will not see the facts when they get bit by them.