Warning: This article quotes an obscenity-riddled advertisement.
Planned Parenthood of New York City began an ad campaign this month called “protect our freedom to f-ck.” In it, actors, from an old man playing chess to a shirtless lady in a laundromat to a drag queen applying makeup, say things like “f-ck me,” “f-ck anyone with a washer and dryer in their f-cking apartment,” “f-ck dancers,” and “f-ck your hottest f-ck, bartender.”
The ad ends with an African-American woman doing a sassy head swivel and saying, “F-ck New York and everyone in it.” A pink screen reads, “Protect our right to safely f-ck whoever the f-ck we want. Donate to Planned Parenthood of New York City.” It’s super classy.
While some of the Twitter commenters said the ad was “brilliant” and suited the intended audience (i.e. New Yorkers), every Internet ad effectively has a global audience, and it wasn’t well-received among plenty of folks. More than a few called it “trash” and others wondered aloud whether the ad was a parody.
Planned Parenthood removed the 45-second ad from YouTube sometime Friday night, but you can still find it via other accounts. While the ad’s vulgarity merits criticism, its core message is much more pernicious.
PP of NYC is saying one or both of the following things in this spot, and they are both lies. The first is that there is any government threat to any adult’s freedom to have sex, and the second is that abortion is necessary for a good sex life.
Planned Parenthood Is Making Up Fake Threats
New Yorkers’ freedom to have sex with “whoever they want” is not under any threat.
Planned Parenthood of New York State just endorsed Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a strong defender of the Left’s sacred cow of sexual libertinism. “Now more than ever we need experienced leaders who understand the importance of protecting access to abortion in New York state,” a spokesman for the organization told the New York Post.
Let’s dispel the notion that that any powerful entity is seriously trying to prevent people from having sexual relations. If anything, powerful entities are subsidizing and preferencing sterile, non-committed, and risky sex through taxpayer and insurance payouts for contraception, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases.
The age of consent in New York is 17, and the state isn’t exactly undergoing a conservative or Christian revival of sexual ethics, so it’s not like there’s even social pressure to maintain abstinence or even monogamy. The federal government hasn’t made any moves recently to restrict people’s ability to “f-ck whoever the f-ck they want,” either.
Is Planned Parenthood facing cuts to taxpayer money? You bet. Are closely held religious organizations allowed to not pay for an employee’s abortifacients? Yep. Are government agents crashing through doors to break up New York orgies? That’d be a no.
Most notably, the ad doesn’t mention any specific policy threats to the “freedom to f-ck.” Given that the whole point is to urge donations to protect this freedom, one might reasonably assume there really aren’t any.
On top of that, Planned Parenthood’s core business of abortion isn’t under threat in New York City, either. Despite the hysterical rhetoric from PP and pro-abortion advocates all over the country—“Reproductive health and rights are under attack like never before,” reads Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s donation page—abortion and contraceptive access remain pretty secure everywhere, not to mention New York City.
The city alone has a whopping 40 facilities that provide “abortion care.” There are no significant roadblocks to obtaining birth control (minors can get a birth control prescription without parental permission and Planned Parenthood hands out condoms for free) and no major restrictions on abortion like waiting periods, “mandated parental involvement,” or gestational cutoffs. The only restriction is on self-induced abortion, which is dangerous to the mother and fatal to the baby.
To Planned Parenthood, Sexual Freedom Is a License to Kill
If your “right” to f-ck while sticking others with the consequences isn’t being infringed upon by lawmakers, then the other interpretation suffices. Yet it is just as mendacious.
Planned Parenthood campaigns for two “sexual health” procedures over anything else: abortion and birth control. Not cancer screenings. Not even HIV testing, although that’s certainly important to them. Definitely not prenatal care.
Planned Parenthood wants contraceptives paid for by taxpayers or other insurance holders via raised premiums to cover no-copay pills, and easy access to abortions—also heavily or, “ideally,” entirely subsidized. (Oh, and to be able to sell the parts of aborted babies, but let’s not get off track). Why? Because this is how PP makes a lot of money. These advocacy positions are self-interested, not public-health-oriented, just like the lobbying of any other big business.
Like Planned Parenthood’s business model, the ad’s logic is truly twisted, and its language certainly Orwellian. What PP of NYC is effectively saying here is, “There is no such thing as sexual freedom if you aren’t allowed to kill the babies that sex makes, or if others aren’t paying for your sexual choices by subsidizing birth control.” They are defining freedom as state sponsorship of their sexual ethic: screwing whoever you want, whenever you want, as whatever identity you want, with the power to kill your own children so they don’t get in the way.
PP wants sexual promiscuity endorsed by the state and by the culture, and if that promiscuity comes at the expense of another human’s life, well, they want you to think no one should criticize you for it. No one should dare try to convince you to not kill your child. That would be sinful, fascist and cruel.
And if anyone dares pressure the government to—Gasp! Horror!—restrict your ability to kill your baby, expect a cyclone of deceit and thuggery from the alphabet soup and feminist fronts to converge on you, batter your defenses, and flood your comfortable spaces until you surrender.
Remember, PP reminds us, you’re not free until everyone else pays for and celebrates your life choices, no matter how bad they are! This kind of freedom looks suspiciously like totalitarianism, don’t you think?