Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Hang in there, Planned Parenthood!


Abortion is a subject on which I support women who get aggressive with people who want to dictate to them. The cruelty of the restrictionists to actual, living women and kids seems to know no bounds. Missed the pink protests yesterday with gungus still colonizing my head (go away rhinovirus!) but was more than there in spirit.

I thought Ann Friedman did a necessary job contextualizing this struggle:

Planned Parenthood is, paradoxically, both an easy target and an effective organization because it is a brand name. Every year, 2.7 million people visit Planned Parenthood’s 700 clinics. One in five women has sought health care there. Women know that, no matter where they are in the country and no matter how much money they have, if they can get themselves to a Planned Parenthood clinic, they can get the morning-after pill, a mammogram, a pelvic exam, an abortion, or a referral. Men know they can go there for an STD test or a cancer screening. They provide reproductive and health-care services to the trans community. Everyone knows these services will be safe and, just as importantly, judgment-free.

But it’s useful, especially with all the action on Planned Parenthood’s behalf today, to remember that we shouldn’t need a reproductive-care health-care brand. Contraception and STD testing and abortion should be things that you get from your regular doctor — and you should have a regular doctor even if you’re poor. Planned Parenthood exists because the services it provides are stigmatized and pushed out of the routine health-care framework, or are unaffordable within it. And its brand recognition is so important, in part, because the opponents of reproductive choice have gone out of their way to confuse women by establishing faux clinics that provide no health services at all, and to spread misinformation about the safety of contraception and abortion.  

It is interesting to reflect that this is the issue that would have driven my deceased Republican committee woman mother out of the GOP. She believed in Planned Parenthood.

2 comments:

Rain Trueax said...

The right wingers are out to make abortion not an option and not birth control either. For liberals or progressives who have been thinking the Pope is on their side-- not where it comes to women. And I just read that he met privately with Kim Davis, hugged her and told her to keep up the good fight. Yes, he talks about poverty and climate change, but all while he talks over the abuses of his priests and the extreme wealth the Church still holds. In the end, he's no different than any other Pope, just more political and aggressive.

Hattie said...

Maureen Dowd wrote a terrific column about the Pope, the best I've read yet. She described him as the perfect Pope for the 19th Century. He is a 19th Century liberal male of benevolent intentions, infinitely patronizing toward the ladies.
There was supposed to be a Planned Parenthood demo in town, but I thought it was at Lincoln Park and never found it. Maybe there will be something in the a.m. paper.