As a representative of the campus pro-life group Vita Clamantis, I find Friday's Verbum Ultimum on Planned Parenthood to be woefully lacking in dispassionate reasoning. The Verbum equated support for federal funding to Planned Parenthood with support for inexpensive health care for women and implied that those who oppose funding to Planned Parenthood are also attacking women's fundamental right to health care. None of these conclusions logically follow, and the Verbum's argument is based on a naive understanding of the nature of Planned Parenthood and the fungibility of money.
Planned Parenthood is not the only organization that does, or could, provide health care for women in this country. Planned Parenthood provides only very limited services for men and women, mainly sexual health consultations, contraceptives and STI and cancer screenings. Rural health centers provide far more comprehensive service, and it is to these clinics that Planned Parenthood refers patients with complaints outside the scope of its own practice. It is our opinion that, when deciding between Planned Parenthood and comparable organizations, the government should refuse funding to Planned Parenthood and favor other health care providers. Though Planned Parenthood does do some good in the limited health care it provides, the organization as a whole systematically promotes illegal, immoral and deceptive behavior.
There are two main ways in which Planned Parenthood has forfeited moral legitimacy, and therefore lost the right to receive funding from the government. First, over the past few years, the organization Live Action has conducted numerous "sting operations" in which people posing as pimps, minors and potential donors record their experience in Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. The video recordings made of these encounters show Planned Parenthood employees facilitating what they believed to be the abuse of women by, among other things, covering up sexual abuse and statutory rape and aiding underage sex trafficking, in direct violation of the laws governing health care providers. The recordings also show employees lying about both the number of abortions Planned Parenthood performs and the nature of abortion for example, providing misinformation about when a baby's heart starts beating. Finally, they also reveal employees accepting fake donations made with the direct and stated purpose of eliminating future black children.
These are just a few of the deeply troubling violations Live Action has brought to light about Planned Parenthood. Besides those uncovered by Live Action, other disturbing facts about Planned Parenthood have been revealed. Former Planned Parenthood branch manager Abby Johnson has said that employees were constantly urged to increase the number of abortions performed. Furthermore, Planned Parenthood has put forward misleading information about its own organization. For example, the oft-reported statistic that only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's services are abortions is based upon a mathematical deception. In addition to the fact that 36.7 percent of Planned Parenthood's income comes from abortions, the 2005-06 Planned Parenthood report on which it is based also reveals that while the organization performs 10 million procedures a year, it performs them for only three million people. Since Planned Parenthood reports all procedures separately, it greatly inflates the number of reported non-abortive services while concealing the fact that clients often receive abortion along with these services.
Secondly, it is simply untrue to say that federal funding has no connection to abortion. Even if the money does fund only non-abortive procedures (which is doubtful for, as mentioned, Planned Parenthood is not particularly honest or law-abiding), the federal funding Planned Parenthood receives allows it to use every donated dollar to fund abortions. Furthermore, tax funding helps to keep Planned Parenthood operating. As such, taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood facilitates abortions, albeit indirectly.
We, along with the pro-life majority of Americans, believe that abortion kills another human being, and so we do not believe that health care providers who perform abortions should receive federal funding. Whatever good they do is vastly outweighed by their deliberate participation in the termination of human lives. Federal funding should go to heath care in this point, the Verbum is correct but the funding should go to true health care providers who neither exploit and abuse women nor take human lives. Planned Parenthood manifestly does not pass these criteria, and we therefore applaud the House for beginning the steps to defund it.
Robert Smith '14 is a guest columnist writing on behalf of Vita Clamantis.
