The biggest lie perpetuated by abortion advocates (including legislators) in the Planned Parenthood funding battle is also a lie meant to scare women: If funding is removed from Planned Parenthood, poor and needy women will be denied access to basic, lifesaving healthcare. But that is, indeed, a lie.
The truth is that women will be better served by the redirection of Planned Parenthood’s funding into comprehensive health clinics. There are 13,540 of these clinics nationwide, compared to 665 Planned Parenthood facilities.
Recently, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) posted a striking graphic that shows the reality of government healthcare funding availability in the nation, pointing out that “there are 20 comprehensive care clinics for every Planned Parenthood.”
Funded in large part by the government, it’s obvious that if these centers had the additional half a billion dollars that Planned Parenthood receives, community healthcare facilities could serve even more women in areas of need.
When questioned by Rep. Diane Black during the congressional hearing on Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding, the president of the abortion business, Cecile Richards, acknowledged that comprehensive health centers outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities.
Casey Mattox, senior counsel at ADF said that if Planned Parenthood’s government funding “went away tomorrow [the money] would be better used by community health centers and other places around the country that can provide a fuller range of services to women without the ethical challenges that Planned Parenthood presents.”
A Daily Signal report also offered the state of Texas, which has already defunded Planned Parenthood, as an example:
In 2012, Texas stopped funding abortion-providers like Planned Parenthood. Instead, in 2013 it created the Women’s Health Program, which provides low-income women with family planning services, health screenings and birth control.
According to a study by George Washington University, this resulted in community clinics increasing their women’s health care services by an average of 81 percent.
Eighty-one percent is a significant number that would be encouraging to people actually interested in women’s healthcare. Likewise, over 13,000 clinics versus less than 700 would also be encouraging–if these opponents were actually interested in women’s healthcare, but they aren’t. They are interested in abortion. If they were actually interested in serving the poor and needy, everyone, Democrat and Republican alike, would distribute the money to places that served more women and did comprehensive health care.
If these women in need, who weren’t trying to obtain or defend abortions, actually knew the facts, they would agree, as well. However, these women have been deceived by the pro-abortion rhetoric, believing that their access to basic services such as Pap smears might be taken away.
The way Planned Parenthood keeps these non-abortion minded women in its fold is by manipulating them with lies that losing government funding will stop their ability to receive healthcare and take away their constitutional rights. Neither is true. And the fact is, the woman in rural Kansas who supposedly had to drive two or three hours to Kansas City to get a “free” Pap smear from Planned Parenthood could have simply driven to the town 10 minutes away which had a federally funded health care clinic. This is the truth that Planned Parenthood fears every needy woman will learn.
Likewise, this is the truth that Congress should know, as they have been entrusted to care for the public they serve. The woman in rural Kansas may not know this truth, but her senators and representatives are responsible for knowing it and making the best decision to help her and other constituents. Unfortunately, that woman cannot make a hefty donation to her elected officials’ re-election campaigns. But Planned Parenthood can.
So Congress continues to serve the abortion profiteer, which shares its profits with pro-abortion politicians. And these politicians ignore the data and information which shows that women would be far better served by redistributing taxpayer dollars to the 13,000-plus healthcare centers. No one is talking about taking the money away entirely, only taking it from an organization that focuses on abortion and has been caught in scandal after scandal.
But Planned Parenthood, for fear of its world of abortion crumbling, continues to tell a lie.
