Planned Parenthood is facing a new round of attacks after heavily edited videos were released that question its fetal tissue donation program. No need for the facts, ma’am, because emotionally-charged phrases like “selling baby parts” and “organ harvesting” have captured the conservative imagination, even fueling a vote in the U.S. Senate yesterday to defund Planned Parenthood.

Never mind that, by law, federal funds can’t be used to pay for abortions in Planned Parenthood clinics except in cases of rape, incest and to protect a woman’s life.

Ignore that 97 percent of the services Planned Parenthood performs each year are not abortions.

Forget that Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization, not a “mill” that “profits” from abortion.

Discount that the fetal tissue under discussion is voluntarily donated by women in the hope something good will come from whatever went wrong, and fetal tissue is handled as medical waste otherwise.

Give no heed that reimbursement for shipping and handling expenses that preserve fetal donations for medical research is not tantamount to “selling” or “trafficking.”

Don’t get me wrong, investigations into both Planned Parenthood and the so-called Center for Medical Progress should go forward if it appears some individuals are not following the law, but a Senate vote to defund Planned Parenthood at this stage is naked political grandstanding.

Furthermore, even in the improbable event it passed and were signed into law, the measure wouldn’t reduce abortions. It would likely have the opposite effect. As Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania noted, “These (Planned Parenthood) programs reduce unintended pregnancies and, as a result, reduce the number of abortions.”

Sen. Casey hit the nail on the head. Thirty-five percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides involve dispensing various contraceptives to patients.

Contraception is the key to greatly reducing abortions. Abortion is safe and legal in the U.S., but it should also be rare, as it is in Western Europe where contraception and abortions are both widely available and accessible.

On the other hand, making abortion illegal — the goal of Operation Rescue, which financially supported the deliberately misleading videos — does not necessarily reduce it, but it does make it more dangerous, as is the case in many Latin American countries. About 200,000 women are hospitalized in Brazil each year due to complications from illegal abortions, which are estimated to number around one million. Women who are poor, young and less educated are especially vulnerable to having botched procedures.

In the U.S., over 20 million women qualify for publicly-funded contraceptive care, either because they are low income or they are under 20 years old. In Colorado, a five-year program which provided free or low-cost long-term contraceptives to teens and poor women resulted in abortion rates plunging by over one-third. Safely. At the same time, the teen birth rate declined by 40 percent. This is a stunning success.

Contraception reduces abortions, and it reduces poverty that results from teens and women becoming mothers or having more children when they’re not ready. A win-win, right?

Except for one thing.

We also have to give up trying to control (poor) women’s sex lives. We have to stop wanting to make women live with the consequences of their (poor) choices. We have to be willing to vacate black-and-white moral high ground in exchange for better practical outcomes — in this case, fewer abortions.

A former anti-abortion activist who now blogs under the name Libby Anne states it this way: “Overturning Roe, I realized, would not make women stop having abortions. Instead, it would simply punish women who have abortions by requiring them to risk their health to do so. This is all well and good if the goal is to punish women for seeking abortions, but if the goal is to keep unborn babies from being murdered, this is extremely ineffective.”

Making deceptive “exposé” videos that purposely undermine Planned Parenthood won’t dramatically reduce abortions or protect women’s health. The answer is much more simple but many are afraid of it. We need to abandon our desire to punish women for making their own choices about sex. Only then can we make widespread progress on reducing abortions.

Over 40 years after Roe v. Wade, are we any closer to giving up our fear of women and sex?

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.