{"id":4168,"date":"2011-03-04T19:59:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-05T00:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stonescryout.org\/?p=4168"},"modified":"2011-03-04T19:59:37","modified_gmt":"2011-03-05T00:59:37","slug":"4168","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/?p=4168","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Columnist Calls for Defunding of Planned Parenthood"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not every day that I will link to an article by\u00a0Kirsten Powers<\/a> but this one is worth reading in its entirety:<\/p>\n

During the recent debate over whether to\u00a0cut off<\/a> government funding to Planned Parenthood, the organization\u00a0claimed<\/a> that its contraceptive services prevent a half-million abortions a year. Without their services, the group\u2019s officials insist,\u00a0more women will get abortions<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ll admit I bought the argument\u2014it makes intuitive sense\u2014and initially opposed cutting off funding for precisely that reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then I did a little research.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Turns out, a 2009 study by the journal Contraception\u00a0found<\/a>, in a 10-year study of women in Spain, that as overall contraceptive use increased from around 49 percent to 80 percent, the elective abortion rate more than doubled. This doesn\u2019t mean that access to\u00a0contraception<\/a> causes more abortion\u2014though some believe that\u2014but that it doesn\u2019t necessarily reduce it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the U.S., the story isn\u2019t much different. A January 2011 fact sheet by the pro-abortion rights\u00a0Guttmacher Institute<\/a> listed all the reasons that women who have had an abortion give for their unexpected pregnancy, and not one of them is lack of access to contraception. In fact, 54 percent of women who had abortions had used a contraceptive method, if incorrectly, in the month they got pregnant. For the 46 percent who had not used contraception, 33 percent had perceived themselves to be at low risk for pregnancy; 32 percent had had concerns about contraceptive methods; 26 percent had had unexpected sex, and 1 percent had been forced to have sex. Not one fraction of 1 percent said they got pregnant because they lacked access to contraception. Some described having unexpected sex, but all that can be said about them is that they are irresponsible, not that they felt they lacked access to contraception.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ms. Powers goes on to torpedo one of Planned Parenthood’s claims that their services help reduce the number of abortions in the United States. However, the numbers over the past ten years tell a different story:<\/p>\n

Over this time period, the U.S. government has funneled billions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, in large part because the organization claims to provide services to avoid unplanned pregnancies \u2013 a laudable goal. Yet despite a robust budget\u2014Planned Parenthood reported a total annual revenue of $1.1 billion in its\u00a0last financial filing<\/a>\u2014the organization has done absolutely nothing to change the fundamental dynamics of the United States\u2019 abortion rate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Digging a little deeper, Ms. Powers finally discovers the true agenda behind Planned Parenthood and why taxpayer funding should end:<\/p>\n

To preserve its federal subsidy, Planned Parenthood continues to claim that without its contraception services the abortion rate will go up. This deception smacks of a fleecing of taxpayers in an effort to promote an ideological agenda, rather than a sincere effort to help women plan families.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is that ideology, exactly? To find out, you have to dig through Planned Parenthood\u2019s tax forms because the group certainly isn\u2019t going to tell you. According to its most\u00a0recent tax filing<\/a>, the purpose of Planned Parenthood Federation of America is to provide leadership in \u201c[a]chieving, through informed individual choice, a U.S. population of stable size in an optimum environment; in stimulating and sponsoring relevant biomedical, socio-economic, and demographic research.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So it is, in reality, a population-control organization. Funny, this was never mentioned in the gauzy $200,000 advertising campaign launched last week. It also doesn\u2019t make it into the \u201cAbout Us\u201d section of the group\u2019s website, which repeatedly claims its mission is to protect women\u2019s health, when in fact the real mission is to keep the birth rate at whatever level the\u00a0leaders believe it should be<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To hear Planned Parenthood and their supporters, they exist only to provide Pap smears or breast exams or prenatal services. In fact, President Cecile Richards has gone so far as to erroneously imply that they provide\u00a0mammograms<\/a>. (A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me that this is untrue.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Planned Parenthood officials are allowed to believe whatever they want and to pursue whatever goals they choose. But their dishonesty in how they present their organization to the public, along with ignoring basic statistics about their area of expertise, makes you wonder what else they are hiding. It\u2019s also hard to deny that they are at core a blindly ideological organization, not a run-of-the-mill charitable nonprofit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whatever you think of abortion rights, this is not the kind of organization that taxpayers should be funding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hats off to Ms. Powers for being willing to do a little homework and discover the truth. If more liberals were willing to set aside the preconceived notions about abortion and examine the facts behind the claims of Planned Parenthood cutting off taxpayer funding would be a no-brainer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not every day that I will link to an article by\u00a0Kirsten Powers but this one is worth reading in its entirety: During the recent debate over whether to\u00a0cut off government funding to Planned Parenthood, the organization\u00a0claimed that its contraceptive services prevent a half-million abortions a year. Without their services, the group\u2019s officials insist,\u00a0more women […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14,55,26,12],"tags":[1033,550,148],"class_list":["post-4168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion","category-culture","category-ethics-morality","category-politics","category-tom","tag-abortion","tag-kirsten-powers","tag-planned-parenthood"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}