The recent release of heavily edited videos purportedly showing officials of Planned Parenthood selling tissue from aborted fetuses tried to make out that they were engaging in a surreptitious, illegal, profit-making activity when in fact they were only doing what the law allows, and that is to recover the costs incurred in supplying tissue for medical research. Heather Digby Parton explains how the outfit that produced the videos was working closely with some Republican members of Congress to produce this coordinated attack.
Elizabeth Warren gave a wonderful speech on the floor of the US Senate where she clearly laid bare the actual agenda of Republicans who, after inciting the base against the right to an abortion, are now shamefully using that to further assault health care services for women in general by denying funding for them. She points out that 97% of Planned Parenthood’s work involves providing all manner of health services to women and only 3% deals with providing safe and legal abortions and that federal funding is already prohibited for that. So what we are witnessing is nothing less than yet another example of the Republican war on women.
She says that she is proud to stand with Planned Parenthood and so should we. Warren and others beat back the effort to defund Planned Parenthood but Republicans are being urged to shut down the government over this issue when the vote on government funding comes up sometime in September. You can be sure that this question will be posed to all the candidates at the debate tonight and repeatedly in the coming weeks and they will all feel pressured to support the shutdown idea though that will likely boomerang on the party since shutting down the government whenever you don’t get your way is getting to be tiresome for everyone.
Larry Wilmore also spoke out against on the attack on Planned Parenthood.
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For years after college, working minimum wage jobs with no benefits, being unemployed for long stretches, working, ironically, in health care where they keep as many people as possible part time or “on call” (sometimes working way over 40 hours a week but with no set schedule), the only health care I got was from Planned Parenthood. Sometimes I could leave them $5. Sometimes I could not.
I just 30 minutes ago read that in Florida, when Jeb! Bush was governor, he took the PP funding and directed it to abstinence only “education” and “crisis pregnancy centers”, which he is now proposing to do nationally. Planned Parenthood in Florida said as a result they now have to charge teens a copay for visits and birth control. Which means I would have just had to do without.
And can we fucking STOP apologizing for PP doing abortions? Oh well only 3% of their activity is abortion -- may be factually true, and that’s fine, but as Katha Pollitt said, why do we say it so apologetically? As in “officer I’m usually law abiding, I just this ONE time ran a stop sign, please forgive me.” Abortion is a legal and necessary medical procedure and not a tragedy, it is not having access to abortion that is the tragedy.
We need to stand with Planned Parenthood because it is the right ethical, correct thing to do and because women are people too.
Axiomatic really yeah?