werepossum
Elite Member
- Jul 10, 2006
- 29,873
- 463
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The only way that would possibly work is if Planned Parenthood hired someone at random to select the firm who conducted the analysis. In any case, watch the videos; the sequences are essentially continuous.
lol Fair enough.
Nobody is aiming to stop low-cost services for poor women, dude. The movement to defund Planned Parenthood is aimed straight at forcing it to divest itself of abortion services. That doesn't mean there won't be collateral damage, of course. Planned Parenthood would not be destroyed if it's defunded. It would divest itself of its abortion business by divesting it into a separate group, then the non-abortion group would once again apply for government funding to deliver the same services. Ideologically that is attractive; practically it is problematic. I highly doubt there is much overlap in such clinics, so for at least one year poor women's health care would be severely disrupted. Beyond that first year, there would be some duplication in management and facilities to maintain abortion-Planned Parenthood and non-abortion-Planned Parenthood as separate entities, resulting in some shift away from Planned Parenthood to other such agencies, but probably also some extra cost to women seeking abortions or other health care. That extra money has to come from somewhere. Marginal clinics might close; certainly marginal abortion clinics would close. At the very least abortion accessibility would suffer; almost certainly poor women's health care would also suffer, even though that wouldn't be the aim. You can't force duplication of scarce resources without additional waste. Also, there are many people extremely strongly supportive of abortion; it's almost a sacrament. I seriously doubt these people are going to allow abortion to go away regardless of whatever hoops must be jumped through, so I seriously doubt that abortions would drop much if at all.
I liken this to the movement to allow gay marriage as long as we don't call it marriage. We already have prohibitions against using federal money (including block grants - Planned Parenthood gets its money in block grants, not in per-service fees) to provide abortion services; it's largely a fiction since money is fungible, but that's the nature of the world. Personally I see no value in forcing duplication to gain a stronger fiction of separation.
EDIT: Two other points here: If Planned Parenthood loses its federal funding, there might be more abortions. A LOT of Planned Parenthood's client base are poor sexually active teenage girls, not exactly a demographic known for making good choices. If a convenient clinic closes, some of those girls will undoubtedly forgo birth control. On the other hand, being pregnant is probably much less likely to be ignored.
Also, if you want to be cynical, a more likely "hidden target" might be Planned Parenthood's political donations and activities, all of which go to Democrats. A particular politician may or may not be mortally offended by abortion, but it's virtually certain that he is mortally offended by people working against his gaining and keeping power.
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