This is the second post in a three-part series. The first post can be read here.
In the wake of the ongoing string of undercover videos that reveal Planned Parenthood'strafficking in babies' body parts donations of tissue, apologists have come crawling out of the woodwork defending the organization on a number of grounds.
As is often the case when things are said by the pro-choice lobby, these defenses at first sound reasonable -- unless you spend more than three or four seconds thinking about them, because if you do, it becomes obvious they're a toxic stew of bullshit and balderdash.
Since so many people don't spend any time thinking about things, and you might find yourself in conversation with some of those people, here's a look at some of the most common defenses being offered on behalf of the organization:
A small percentage!
For years, Planned Parenthood and its apologists have peddled the lie that abortion amounts to a minuscule percentage of what it does, and it even has the audacity to quantify the claim by saying abortions total three percent of its total procedures -- a figure which even that notorious right wing rag Slate admits is "meaningless."
The figure is legitimate only if you are willing to overlook how brazenly deceiving it is. Planned Parenthood arrives at three percent by doing what is known in medical and insurance circles as "unbundling," i.e., they log every item of minutiae as a different procedure for billing purposes. With unbundling, if you go to Planned Parenthood seeking an abortion, and in the process of providing it to you they conduct a consultation; pregnancy test; mandated HIV test; pre-op screening; the abortion itself; and post-op painkiller prescription, they will charge for each of those six items separately, and will also charge the anesthesia separately from the abortion -- and thus they can claim that only 14 percent of the things they did (one of seven) was an abortion, even though 100 percent of them were done specifically to provide that abortion.
It doesn't take a lot of digging to learn that Planned Parenthood unbundles its billing, but of course, Planned Parenthood knows most people are headline-readers who will never dig at all.
It's not a money-maker!
Closely related to the "three percent lie" is the "there's no money in it lie."
Planned Parenthood has long painted a public face of itself as a selfless organization that performs abortions at little to no benefit to itself. However, multiple reviews of its books have shown that abortion accounts for anywhere from 33.3 to 38.4 percent of its operational revenue, which is enormous when you consider how many services Planned Parenthood pats itself on the back for providing.
To be conservative, let's say the lowest percentage in the range, 33.3, is the one that's accurate. Now suppose that your employer offered, say, twelve different products to the public and one of those twelve generated 33.3 percent of its revenue. That would mean a product which amounts to just one out of its twelve offerings is responsible for attracting one out of every three dollars that comes in the door; or, to put it another way, something which accounts for 8.3 percent of the product line generates 33.3 percent of the revenue.
Do you think for one second that any company in the world would consider such a product to be merely incidental to its overall offerings? Do you believe for one second that any company would consider such a product to be of little to no financial benefit? Of course not. A product or service generating those kinds of numbers is undoubtedly looked upon as a core, fundamental, and probably indispensable part of any enterprise lucky enough to have it on its roster.
For comparison, McDonald's probably considers hamburgers, cheeseburgers, Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets, french fries, Egg McMuffins, Sausage McMuffins, hash browns, Big Breakfasts, apple pies, chocolate fudge sundaes, fountain drinks, and coffee to all be core and fundamental to its business -- and there is absolutely no way that any one of those things accounts for 33.3 percent of its top line.
The videos are edited!
The claim that the abridged versions of the undercover videos are misleading is, in a nutshell, false. I already dealt with this in my first post and don't want to rehash, but I do want to reiterate that every single time the Center for Medical Progress has released an abridged version of a video, it has also released the unabridged version. This is unique in the history of whistleblowing.
And I want to make this tangential observation, since it is always leftists who defend Planned Parenthood: Isn't it funny how they are suddenly opposed to whistleblowing after all those years of praising whistleblowers? Isn't it funny how they are suddenly recoiling from the leaking of what happens behind the closed doors of the powerful, after all those years of rejoicing whenever such secrets were revealed?
Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Edward Snowden? They were heroes! CMP founder David Daleiden? He's a dishonorable reprobate and his employees are waging a war on women's rights! The Left's partisan disconnect when it comes to abortion is so blind and glaring that it's comical.
Women's health!
Almost every defense offered on Planned Parenthood's behalf is offered because people believe the oft-repeated claim that it supports and promotes "women's health" by providing services that some women can't get elsewhere. However, that claim is not even close to being true.
On the same day that the third undercover video was released, our government's top healthcare official, HHS Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell, spoke in favor of continuing to make taxpayers fund Planned Parenthood by asserting that "our HHS funding is focused on preventative care for women, things like mammograms and cancer prevention screenings" ... She was echoing her boss, Supreme Leader Barack Obama Himself, who during a 2012 presidential debate intoned that there are "millions of women" who "rely on Planned Parenthood for mammograms" ... However, there is this little thing called the truth, and the truth is that the number of mammograms performed by Planned Parenthood is: Zero.
Yes, the organization does provide low- or no-cost screenings for cancer, but so too do state health departments, the CDC, and a plethora of community health centers ... and so too do Obria Medical Clinics, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and all FQHC's ... plus, women can go to freeclinics.com to find a listing of other places that do the same ... plus, women who are into a holistic New Agey breed of healtchcare can visit a FEMM clinic (go here to visit FEMM's web site and here to read an article about FEMM).
Faced with these facts, some apologists are sure to counter that Planned Parenthood is different than other women's healthcare providers because it sets up shop in poor and minority neighborhoods, in order to serve poor and minority women who can't access the other providers. But as The Daily Signal makes clear, that claim is extremely false. In reality, there is less than one Planned Parenthood facility for every twenty other comprehensive women's healthcare facilities; and as the maps in the linked-to article show, the "other twenty" serve the same areas as Planned Parenthood while also serving vast swaths that Planned Parenthood makes no effort to serve.
And here are some more facts: 1) The "other twenty" serve women withoutpersuading them to kill their babies participating in abortion, whereas Planned Parenthood kills more than 300,000 babies per year performs one out of every three abortions in America; 2) a lopsidedly large percentage of Planned Parenthood facilities (and abortion-performing facilities in general) are located in ZIP codes with high minority populations; 3) abortions are performed on black babies in disproportionately large numbers; 4) in 1926, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was the featured speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally; 5) in 1932 she wrote that she favored "a strong and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation"; 6) in 1934 she advocated for an American Baby Code that sought "selective births" in order to "protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit"; 7) in 1939 she penned this private letter in which she said "we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population"; 8) she never disavowed those racist goals; and yet, 9) to this day, rather than disassociate itself from Sanger, Planned Parenthood continues to call its highest honor The Margaret Sanger Award.
Make of that what you will, but doesn't it make it seem uncomfortably odd that the American Left continues to protect and reward Planned Parenthood with more devotion and ferocity than it offers to any other organization in the country?
But I digress. In the meantime, Planned Parenthood opposes informed consent laws that require women considering abortion to be given information about alternative options. It also opposes giving women considering abortion the mere right to view an ultrasound image of their baby before deciding to abort.
Looking at a couple years for which numbers are readily available, in 2011 Planned Parenthood performed 333,964 abortions while providing just 28,674 women with prenatal care; and in 2012 it performed 327,166 abortions while giving just 2,197 women adoption referrals. Assuming those numbers are in line with other years, they mean that on an annual basis Planned Parenthood: 1) aborts more babies than the entire human population of St. Louis; 2) performs abortions on approximately 11.5 women for every one that it actually gives pregnancy care to; and 3) performs abortions on approximately 150 women for every one that it refers to an adoption agency.
When you consider the organization's stances two paragraphs above, in concert with its numbers one paragraph above and its now-revealed trafficking in baby body parts, the combination strongly implies that it promotes rather than simply offers abortion. When you consider all these things, what do you think are the odds that it goes out of its way to inform patients about the fact that women who have abortions often experience severe psychological trauma later in life, when the reality of what they did sinks in and they start wondering what their dead child would have worn to prom?
So I ask two questions
First, why is it that Planned Parenthood is considered good at all for women's health, much less indispensable for women's health?
And second, why is it that anyone thinks Planned Parenthood is entitled to one penny of the taxpayers' money? Especially when it already receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year in operational revenue plus hundreds of millions more in donations and investment income?
In the wake of the ongoing string of undercover videos that reveal Planned Parenthood's
As is often the case when things are said by the pro-choice lobby, these defenses at first sound reasonable -- unless you spend more than three or four seconds thinking about them, because if you do, it becomes obvious they're a toxic stew of bullshit and balderdash.
Since so many people don't spend any time thinking about things, and you might find yourself in conversation with some of those people, here's a look at some of the most common defenses being offered on behalf of the organization:
A small percentage!
For years, Planned Parenthood and its apologists have peddled the lie that abortion amounts to a minuscule percentage of what it does, and it even has the audacity to quantify the claim by saying abortions total three percent of its total procedures -- a figure which even that notorious right wing rag Slate admits is "meaningless."
The figure is legitimate only if you are willing to overlook how brazenly deceiving it is. Planned Parenthood arrives at three percent by doing what is known in medical and insurance circles as "unbundling," i.e., they log every item of minutiae as a different procedure for billing purposes. With unbundling, if you go to Planned Parenthood seeking an abortion, and in the process of providing it to you they conduct a consultation; pregnancy test; mandated HIV test; pre-op screening; the abortion itself; and post-op painkiller prescription, they will charge for each of those six items separately, and will also charge the anesthesia separately from the abortion -- and thus they can claim that only 14 percent of the things they did (one of seven) was an abortion, even though 100 percent of them were done specifically to provide that abortion.
It doesn't take a lot of digging to learn that Planned Parenthood unbundles its billing, but of course, Planned Parenthood knows most people are headline-readers who will never dig at all.
It's not a money-maker!
Closely related to the "three percent lie" is the "there's no money in it lie."
Planned Parenthood has long painted a public face of itself as a selfless organization that performs abortions at little to no benefit to itself. However, multiple reviews of its books have shown that abortion accounts for anywhere from 33.3 to 38.4 percent of its operational revenue, which is enormous when you consider how many services Planned Parenthood pats itself on the back for providing.
To be conservative, let's say the lowest percentage in the range, 33.3, is the one that's accurate. Now suppose that your employer offered, say, twelve different products to the public and one of those twelve generated 33.3 percent of its revenue. That would mean a product which amounts to just one out of its twelve offerings is responsible for attracting one out of every three dollars that comes in the door; or, to put it another way, something which accounts for 8.3 percent of the product line generates 33.3 percent of the revenue.
Do you think for one second that any company in the world would consider such a product to be merely incidental to its overall offerings? Do you believe for one second that any company would consider such a product to be of little to no financial benefit? Of course not. A product or service generating those kinds of numbers is undoubtedly looked upon as a core, fundamental, and probably indispensable part of any enterprise lucky enough to have it on its roster.
For comparison, McDonald's probably considers hamburgers, cheeseburgers, Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets, french fries, Egg McMuffins, Sausage McMuffins, hash browns, Big Breakfasts, apple pies, chocolate fudge sundaes, fountain drinks, and coffee to all be core and fundamental to its business -- and there is absolutely no way that any one of those things accounts for 33.3 percent of its top line.
The videos are edited!
The claim that the abridged versions of the undercover videos are misleading is, in a nutshell, false. I already dealt with this in my first post and don't want to rehash, but I do want to reiterate that every single time the Center for Medical Progress has released an abridged version of a video, it has also released the unabridged version. This is unique in the history of whistleblowing.
And I want to make this tangential observation, since it is always leftists who defend Planned Parenthood: Isn't it funny how they are suddenly opposed to whistleblowing after all those years of praising whistleblowers? Isn't it funny how they are suddenly recoiling from the leaking of what happens behind the closed doors of the powerful, after all those years of rejoicing whenever such secrets were revealed?
Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Edward Snowden? They were heroes! CMP founder David Daleiden? He's a dishonorable reprobate and his employees are waging a war on women's rights! The Left's partisan disconnect when it comes to abortion is so blind and glaring that it's comical.
Women's health!
Almost every defense offered on Planned Parenthood's behalf is offered because people believe the oft-repeated claim that it supports and promotes "women's health" by providing services that some women can't get elsewhere. However, that claim is not even close to being true.
On the same day that the third undercover video was released, our government's top healthcare official, HHS Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell, spoke in favor of continuing to make taxpayers fund Planned Parenthood by asserting that "our HHS funding is focused on preventative care for women, things like mammograms and cancer prevention screenings" ... She was echoing her boss, Supreme Leader Barack Obama Himself, who during a 2012 presidential debate intoned that there are "millions of women" who "rely on Planned Parenthood for mammograms" ... However, there is this little thing called the truth, and the truth is that the number of mammograms performed by Planned Parenthood is: Zero.
Yes, the organization does provide low- or no-cost screenings for cancer, but so too do state health departments, the CDC, and a plethora of community health centers ... and so too do Obria Medical Clinics, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and all FQHC's ... plus, women can go to freeclinics.com to find a listing of other places that do the same ... plus, women who are into a holistic New Agey breed of healtchcare can visit a FEMM clinic (go here to visit FEMM's web site and here to read an article about FEMM).
Faced with these facts, some apologists are sure to counter that Planned Parenthood is different than other women's healthcare providers because it sets up shop in poor and minority neighborhoods, in order to serve poor and minority women who can't access the other providers. But as The Daily Signal makes clear, that claim is extremely false. In reality, there is less than one Planned Parenthood facility for every twenty other comprehensive women's healthcare facilities; and as the maps in the linked-to article show, the "other twenty" serve the same areas as Planned Parenthood while also serving vast swaths that Planned Parenthood makes no effort to serve.
And here are some more facts: 1) The "other twenty" serve women without
Make of that what you will, but doesn't it make it seem uncomfortably odd that the American Left continues to protect and reward Planned Parenthood with more devotion and ferocity than it offers to any other organization in the country?
But I digress. In the meantime, Planned Parenthood opposes informed consent laws that require women considering abortion to be given information about alternative options. It also opposes giving women considering abortion the mere right to view an ultrasound image of their baby before deciding to abort.
Looking at a couple years for which numbers are readily available, in 2011 Planned Parenthood performed 333,964 abortions while providing just 28,674 women with prenatal care; and in 2012 it performed 327,166 abortions while giving just 2,197 women adoption referrals. Assuming those numbers are in line with other years, they mean that on an annual basis Planned Parenthood: 1) aborts more babies than the entire human population of St. Louis; 2) performs abortions on approximately 11.5 women for every one that it actually gives pregnancy care to; and 3) performs abortions on approximately 150 women for every one that it refers to an adoption agency.
When you consider the organization's stances two paragraphs above, in concert with its numbers one paragraph above and its now-revealed trafficking in baby body parts, the combination strongly implies that it promotes rather than simply offers abortion. When you consider all these things, what do you think are the odds that it goes out of its way to inform patients about the fact that women who have abortions often experience severe psychological trauma later in life, when the reality of what they did sinks in and they start wondering what their dead child would have worn to prom?
So I ask two questions
First, why is it that Planned Parenthood is considered good at all for women's health, much less indispensable for women's health?
And second, why is it that anyone thinks Planned Parenthood is entitled to one penny of the taxpayers' money? Especially when it already receives hundreds of millions of dollars per year in operational revenue plus hundreds of millions more in donations and investment income?
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