Re: Pro-Choice - It's Just This Simple[W:432]
So who here knew that Alan Guttmacher founded planned parenthood?
I'm sure you see no problem with gleaning *statistics* that justify the existence and minimalize the accountability of PP from...Guttmachers.....
Guttmacher did NOT found Planned Parenthood. He was a president of that organization. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger. And frankly, it's unbelievably sexist of you to say Guttmacher founded a major international organization that was actually founded by a woman.
Responsible pro-lifers know perfectly well that Guttmacher's statistics on abortion are reliable. They don't justify the existence of PP. PP began as a family planning non-profit which emphasized contraception.
Sanger did not approve of abortion, because in her time, abortion was very dangerous for women. Legal induced abortion did not reach the point of being as safe as childbirth until about 1948. However, after that, it became safer at a faster rate than childbirth and finally way outpaced it. Sanger thus built PP around contraceptive knowledge and access.
Until the end of the 1960s, that's what PP was, an organization distributing information about contraception and providing access to it. But when the US government became concerned about the need for access to affordable health care in the late 1960s, it decided to make a deal with PP to provide other kinds of health services and it offered PP funds from Title X for those services, which were considered medical. It made this deal because PP had a broad network of PP offices all over the US, including in rural areas.
That was the beginning of PP receiving government funds, before which it had not received any. It was also the beginning of PP providing such medical services as testing for STDs and some other kinds of medical health care. This is why PP became a set of clinics rather than offices.
Since women often patronized PP everywhere, as contraceptive knowledge and access were popular, and for women sexual health was especially important and related to pregnancy and childbirth, many low-income women even relied on PP for their health care in general. The services PP offered increased in variety and included services for men. PP got funds for these from Title X because of the deal.
When abortion became legal in 1973, PP decided to include abortion as an alternative in its family planning synthesis, and abortion services, too, though it has only offered first trimester abortions and has not offered such services at all of its clinics.
PP is a great organization in all of its current functions, its original one, the one it agreed to in a deal with the federal government which served that government's public health care aims, not PPs, and the abortion provision function. Because PP does not perform any abortions beyond the first trimester and it has the capacity to refer clients to clinics and doctors able to handle more complicated abortions, people who have abortions at PP almost never have complications. PPs are virtually all well-managed and do not violate laws or regulations, because they are very experienced.
If the government funding goes away, PP will just cut back on the services for which that funding was intended, namely, STD test, cancer screenings, and all sorts of other medical services. It will go back to being what it originally was, a purely privately funded family planning organization offering family planning info and low cost contraception as well as medical referral services. However, that doesn't mean it will stop providing abortion services, which are paid for only by private contributions (often earmarked for these services by contributors).
The notion that abortion is PP's big business is incorrect. It grew into the giant international organization that it became by providing good family planning into and low-cost contraception, and it expanded to providing other medical services than abortion at the request of the federal government.
Your open ignorance of PP and Guttmacher is what inspired me to write this post. You can find this information just by googling PP and reading its history on a wiki.
Ok, this back and forth has been going on long enough and it's now come to an end. Please move on folks. And no one else should pick up their discussion.