Sixty-Five-Year-Olds Don?t Go to Planned Parenthood for Abortions

Sixty-Five-Year-Olds Don?t Go to Planned Parenthood for Abortions

Carole Joffe: Sixty-Five-Year-Olds Don?t Go to Planned Parenthood for Abortions

Though many people are shocked by Congress? recent withdrawal of funds from Planned Parenthood clinics to provide family planning services, right-wing attacks on this organization are nothing new. For example, the Texas legislature in late 2005 passed legislation that redirected millions of dollars from Planned Parenthood and other family planning providers in the state to Crisis Pregnancy Centers, organizations which promote bringing pregnancies to term and offer no contraceptive services. Here is an excerpt from a blog post written by an impoverished Latina woman, ?Tanya,? the day this new policy was announced:

So this morning I dragged myself out of bed before dawn to be at planned parenthood at 730 and wait in the freezing morning shade until 9 for my annual exam. At 930, myself and the 25 other women (of color) grumbled in solidarity and confusion, wondering why we were still waiting and shivering, finally an employee opened the doors, and corralled us inside just to inform us that there would be no walk-in exams today. or tomorrow. or ever. Boys at the texas state legislature cut pp?s funding by 40% last Friday.

I stood at the office stunned, while 3 mothers began to cry. Another woman, at least 65 years old, turned to me and asked, ?que dijo?? (what did she say?). as I tried to explain what I still didn?t understand, I began to feel my anger swell. Overnight one of the safest, most reliable, most critical social services vanished.

As Tanya makes clear, low income women come to Planned Parenthood clinics for a variety of services. As Planned Parenthood spokespersons endlessly repeat, only 3 percent of the organization?s services involve abortion, and no public funds are used to subsidize those procedures. The elderly woman mentioned in the blog post was presumably there, like Tanya herself, for an annual exam that includes breast and cervical cancer screenings. Tanya was also there for reduced-cost birth control pills.

So, the obvious question is, why these attacks, at both the state and federal levels, by virulent opponents of abortion on an organization whose mission, contained in its very name, is to reduce unplanned pregnancies? How did Planned Parenthood come to be so demonized? This, after all, is an organization once so mainstream that the wife of conservative icon Barry Goldwater founded its Arizona chapter and in 1965 former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower agreed to be co-chairs of an honorary advisory board.

For me, the two most compelling answers to this question lie in the reframing of contraception within antiabortion circles and the continued dominance of the religious Right in Republican circles, all the buzz about the Tea Party notwithstanding. As I discuss at greater length in Dispatches from the Abortion Wars, while politicians on both sides of the abortion divide once viewed contraception as true ?common ground? (in the late 1970s, as a Texas congressman, George H.W. Bush was such an enthusiast for subsidized family planning that his nickname in the House was ?Rubbers?), over time this understanding broke down.

Particularly after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 with the active help of social conservatives, contraception, and facilities like Planned Parenthood clinics that provided such services, came to be seen as ?supportive of the abortion mentality? because often these two services were delivered in the same building (albeit with strict separation of funding). Also, as abortion opponents frequently put it, by their logic, those who try to prevent conception are more likely to choose an abortion if contraception fails.

In yet another evolution, those attacking contraception escalated from calling it ?supportive? of abortion to claiming that contraception actually is an ?abortifacient,? that is, something that causes an ?abortion.? Therefore, by the late 1990s, the pharmacy became a new battleground in the U.S. reproductive wars, with numerous instances of ?pro-life? pharmacists refusing to dispense both emergency contraception and ?regular? birth control pills.

Finally, the attacks on Planned Parenthood (as well as other recent appalling legislation we have seen in Congress, like the Orwellian-sounding Protect Life Act, which allows hospitals to deny abortions in life-threatening situations) are occurring because the Republican leadership clearly thinks such moves are good politics at a time of concern over the federal deficit. The massive budget cuts proposed by Republicans, egged on by Tea Partiers, will not create jobs; indeed, economists such as Paul Krugman have argued that such massive cuts are job-destroying. Moreover, such cuts have the potential to create hardships for conservative families as well as the hated liberal ones, and in any case, the proposed cuts will not survive the Senate and the president’s veto. The one core GOP constituency that Republicans can reliably reward is the religious Right, an absolutely crucial group for the party both in terms of donations and precinct level electoral work.

Of course, one can reasonably hope that neither the defunding of Planned Parenthood nor the various legislative attacks on abortion will survive in their present form in the Senate. But holding these votes still reassures the conservative religious base that its concerns are being heard, and most importantly, does serious damage by moving the ?center? of reproductive politics farther to the right. It may be too much for the Democrat-led Senate or the president to defund Planned Parenthood entirely, but it will seem a reasonable compromise to significantly cut the group?s allotment and to continue the longstanding policy of inadequately funding contraceptive services more generally. Maybe hospitals will not have the option of letting women die if an abortion would save their lives, but other cruel restrictions (refusing an abortion if bringing the pregnancy to term would cause serious health damage) will, again, be seen as acceptable?or at least, necessary?compromises. Until enough American voters see the absurdity of these compromises?not to mention the misogyny of denying poor women cancer screenings at a Planned Parenthood clinic?the United States will fall even further behind other industrialized countries with respect to basic reproductive health care.

An earlier version of this post appeared at RH Reality Check.