On Thursday, Health Affairs claimed that if Planned Parenthood were to lose taxpayer funds, women would suffer without access to health care. The report paints a rather bleak picture for low-income women: More than half of Planned Parenthood locations are in “medically underserved areas” and “the number of low-income women in need of family planning services increased by 17% from 2000 to 2010… [Now] 20.1 million, are in need of publicly funded contraception.”
In the past, Planned Parenthood has claimed that half of their patients are enrolled in Medicaid. Let’s take a look at those numbers for a second:
If it really is true that half of Planned Parenthood’s patients are enrolled in Medicaid, then it’s clear they’re targeting lower-income women. Nationally, 1 in 5 Americans are enrolled in Medicaid. This means that half of Planed Parenthood’s clientele are from these 20 percent who rely on federal funds.
NPR recently reported that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clients in 2012 “lived at 150 percent of the federal poverty level or lower (that comes out to around $18,500 for a single adult).”
How Planned Parenthood Preys Upon Poor Women
The numbers are clear: 20.1 million women cannot afford contraception, and are stuck trying to rely on Planned Parenthood for help. Willis L. Krumholz has explained that in order to sustain itself financially, abortion providers have an incentive to undersupply birth control to keep women dependent upon abortion-on-demand.
Earlier this year, Planned Parenthood objected to a Senate proposal that would have allowed the birth control pill to be sold over-the-counter (OTC), thereby circumventing the need for women to see a doctor to obtain a prescription for the pill. Cutting out a trip to the doctor would be a huge benefit for women who live in medically underserved areas. They could now just go to their local pharmacy to pick up contraceptives instead of having to find a doctor that accepts Medicaid.
Planned Parenthood’s objections to the OTC proposal make sense. They’re targeting poor women who can’t get access to doctors, while undersupplying birth control in an attempt to force women to rely on abortion to solve their family-planning woes. After all, it’s more profitable to provide an abortion for a woman than to provide her with contraceptives, and the money made from harvesting organs from babies is just a cherry on top.
By now, it should be obvious that Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about women, or their health, at all. But unfortunately the ways they’ve failed women doesn’t just stop with targeting the poor ones. They have a history of covering up sexual abuse and exposing women to infectious diseases.
Enabling Sexual Predators
The Alliance Defending Freedom released a report Thursday detailing how Planned Parenthood clinics across the country performed abortions on sexually abused minors and did not report the abuse to authorities.
Clinic locations in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Ohio all failed to follow mandatory reporting laws and alert the authorities that a minor had been sexually abused, or they failed to alert the parents of a minor seeking an abortion.
Within the report are numerous stories of Planned Parenthood repeatedly supplying abortions to very young girls who are clearly being sexually victimized. One such story is about a girl from Alabama:
[The] 14-year-old mother of two presented to Planned Parenthood on April 9, 2014, for an abortion, and then again on August 18, 2014, for another abortion. Yet Planned Parenthood apparently so no red flags and made no report to authorities. This is consistent with numerous cases across the country.
When an abortion is performed on a child who is clearly a victim of statutory rape, if not worse, the evidence is tossed away and the crime is covered up. The abuser is free to continue harming a child, and the police are none the wiser.
An organization that pretends to be all about helping women ought to protect and look out for victims of abuse, especially a 14-year-old girl who has been pregnant at least four times, but it’s clear their priorities don’t lie with helping women.
Exposing Women To Diseases
In a recent Planned Parenthood video, it seems that women are being exposed to life-threatening diseases all the time. StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer quipped that she had seen “all sorts of stuff” when it comes to unsanitary conditions in the clinics.
‘[There are] rampant problems with bacteria in certain clinics,’ StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer says in the video. ‘Some where you’re kind of like in question of really, should they really, you know… I’ve seen staph [infections] come out of clinics… I’ve seen all sorts of things come out of clinics.’
Her description of the unsanitary conditions at the clinics is nothing new or unheard of. The abortion industry has been fraught with health safety issues for years. Clinics in Virginia have been caught using unsterilized, bloody equipment to perform abortions, and doctors have failed to wash their hands after administering vaginal ultrasounds.
Mollie Hemingway detailed some of the findings of a 65-page health inspection report on an abortion clinic located in Arlington County:
The inspectors observed that two blood collection tubes, designated as ‘clean and ready for use’, actually had a ‘dark reddish substance’ where the tube for blood collection attached. A staff member said that the cleaning process for these tubes is to run them under water and then soak them in alcohol at the end of the day, but not between patient uses. When the inspectors pointed out the substance, a staff member said, ‘That looks like blood. They aren’t clean.’ So the staffer ran them under water and said the ‘blood’ was gone.
Unlike what abortionists want you to believe, getting an abortion isn’t safe, nor should it be legal. The abortion industry really doesn’t care about women enough to properly clean their clinics or report sexual abuse.
Women deserve better than Planned Parenthood. Women deserve quality medical care and family planning services that don’t push them into getting an abortion, and women deserve to be free from Planned Parenthood’s exploitative grasp.
