What Planned Parenthood actually does
By Ezra Klein

With Planned Parenthood being either the major obstacle to a budget deal or one of the major obstacles to a budget deal, it’s worth taking a minute explaining what they do — and what they don’t do.

As you can see in the chart atop this post, abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities. That’s less than cancer screening and prevention (16 percent), STD testing for both men and women (35 percent), and contraception (also 35 percent). About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s users are over age 20, and 75 percent have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. It’s also worth noting that federal law already forbids Planned Parenthood from using the funds it receives from the government for abortions.

So though the fight over Planned Parenthood might be about abortion, Planned Parenthood itself isn’t about abortion. It’s primarily about contraception and reproductive health. And if Planned Parenthood loses funding, what will mainly happen is that cancer screenings and contraception and STD testing will become less available to poorer people. Folks with more money, of course, have many other ways to receive all these services, and tend to get them elsewhere already.

The fight also isn’t about cutting spending. The services Planned Parenthood provides save the federal government a lot of money. It’s somewhat cold to put it in these terms, but taxpayers end up bearing a lot of the expense for unintended pregnancies among people without the means to care for their children. The same goes for preventable cancers and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. You can find a lot more information about Planned Parenthood and its services here.

They could always stop performing abortions, and then the point would be moot.

Rynar, please don't get fed by the troll.

Lex, don't try to argue with anti-abortion zealots like they have any kind of sense.

Fantastic.

Let me make a few statements on my behalf:

1. Coro, I don't believe you. My feelings are that it had just been too long since you last launched some ill-concieved horse-shit bomb and you thought this might be a good opportunity. Anything further on the topic is nothing more than a grand ret-con.

2. While I appriciate your attribution, I think you have my participation confused with that of, well, pretty much everyone else on the forum.

3. I honestly don't care enough about you, or anyone else here to care about the personal moral implications of your stances on abortion. Should someone decide to get one, to my way of thinking it's probably better that they won't be passing along their morals to their children in the first place. Less energy for me to expend on worthless people going forward and all that. I only wish the preferred method was an unattended gunshot to the stomache.

Ask me what I think about people who support abortions? Living sewage, who don't repect human life, and deserve whatever ill comes to them in life.

I don't intend to argue with you but I did want to say that reading this was pretty disheartening. I'm not sure that I'll be able to hold discourse with you any longer, knowing ahead of time that I'm already a piece of **** who deserves a head-on collision should it happen.

So someone with a mainstream opinion on a national political topic is akin to someone who's personally abusing children? And you're not an anti-abortion zealot?

This.

There are cultures which have embraced the systematic abuse of women, slavery, child abuse... It doesn't make those actions somehow better or more just. Appeal to popularity all you like.

It’s also worth noting that federal law already forbids Planned Parenthood from using the funds it receives from the government for abortions.

Has the government stopped me from buying widgets? No they haven't. They've paid all my other expenses so that any money that comes in from private donations can go to buy widgets.

This just proves my point on many anti-abortion people being more concerned with being right and/or holy than they are with saving children. Faced with an organization that prevents more abortions than it causes, they would rather dismantle it and increase the amount of abortions occurring because it's "right."

That's true, and it's exactly the argument liberals use to oppose education funds going to private religious schools, which, of course, anti-abortion conservatives generally have no problem with. So, I don't disagree with the point, but I don't think most people really embrace the principle involved; they just use it as a convenient argument to undermine programs they oppose.

an organization that prevents more abortions than it causes

Because I have no reason to believe they're lying about that statistic. Also, making contraceptives available and educating people about sex is proven to reduce the teen pregnancy and unwanted pregnancy rates, it's pretty logical that Planned Parenthood's distribution of contraceptives would prevent abortions.

For example, in Germany the average person becomes sexually active at age 14, yet they have one-half the abortion rate, and one-fifth the teen pregnancy rate of the US. If you compare Germany to some southern states, they have one-tenth the teen pregnancy rate. We have far too many religious people in this country that champion total ignorance as a virtue, we need organizations like PP. Planned Parenthood provides a necessary function educating people who were or are being raised by religious zealot parents that would rather their kids remain completely ignorant and not even know what a condom is. Remember Beryllin? He flat out admitted that he would prefer his children to not know anything about even the existence of contraception and honestly there are millions of parents like him, especially in the South.