Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I guess my political views are pretty hard-core right-wing. Even so, I can see a way for the taxpayers to fund Planned Parenthood.
If they offered sex education and free condoms or IUDs, so people who weren’t ready for kids wouldn’t get pregnant and contribute to the overall welfare caseload, I could support that.
If they offered abortions for women who suffered rape or incest; and the abortions were conditional upon the victim fully cooperating with law enforcement including saving fetal tissue for DNA testing; I could support that.
If Planned Parenthood offered the services it says it offers, and nothing more, then I’d be willing to fund them. The problem is that’s not all they do. The undercover videos of Planned Parenthood doctors negotiating for body parts shows they’re not in the baby-prevention business as much as the baby-killing business just like Kenneth Gosnell (but with better PR).
Killing the baby as it’s being born might technically qualify as “birth control,” but only in the most contorted use of the word. We could reduce class sizes in schools, if we murdered half the students. We need to look beyond the ends, we need to question the means, to see if they’re compatible with our notions of civilized society. To the extent Planned Parenthood persists in performing savage rituals and lying to me about it, I have no problem de-funding them. If Democrats want to shut down the entire government over that issue, I’d do it.
Saving babies is a political hill I’m willing to die on. The shameful part is there are so few of us.
Joe Doakes
I’m getting more militant about it the older I get.
For me, the telling point was when I looked up the total number of abortionists (about 1800), the total number of surgical abortions (about 1 million), and the average price per abortion (about $500) on the Guttmacher Institute’s site–that would be Planned Parenthood’s research foundation. Then I looked up the average wage of a gynecologist–apparently about $250,000 annually.
In a nutshell, there is enough revenue to pay the abortionists’ wages, but not to cover the building, anesthesia, supplies, insurance, and other costs of running an abortuary. So the subsidies for Planned Infanticide simply make up the difference and keep abortion available outside big cities and big university (D1 really) towns.
The Right’s ***legal threats*** on abortion grows Planned Parenthood’s fixed overhead and political power. Same thing for Democrat party power. Just make the moral case. That is as good as it will get and the GOP will get more votes that they deserve.