I see that the Senate is voting to defund Planned Parenthood. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand they do heaps of good. On the other hand, many people have a very serious moral problem with their tax dollars being used to pay for abortions. And whether you or I agree with them or not, there is a very valid question as to whether or not the government should ever pay for abortions.
I find myself in a very odd position regarding this issue, in that I have a foot in both camps. My own stance is that I strongly support every woman’s right to choose for herself, and I also strongly think that taxpayer money should NOT be spent on abortions. The issue is too volatile, too divisive, and too personal for government involvement.
To illustrate this, consider another highly volatile and polarized issue. Think about how a sector of the taxpaying public would react if the US government decided to start spending money to buy handguns for private citizens. Gun opponents would be tearing their hair out, and properly so, demanding that the government stop funding gun purchases to buy handguns for private citizens.
Here’s my bottom line:
The fact that something is legal, or even that it is a right which is protected by the Constitution, does NOT necessarily mean that taxpayer money should support it.
Call me crazy, but just as I think the US Government shouldn’t buy guns for private citizens, I also think the US Government shouldn’t buy abortions for private citizens. Those are personal choices that for me absolutely shouldn’t be funded by taxes.
However, I have a simple solution to the Planned Parenthood problem. Planned Parenthood should spin off the part of the organization that is involved in performing abortions. Call the new organization something related, perhaps “Planned Choice”. It would be a totally separate organization.
Then Planned Parenthood could have its government funding restored, and they could get back to doing what most of their time and money is currently spent doing, which is providing a wide variety of prenatal counseling, information and solutions. This is a wise investment of taxpayer funds, because preventing problems early is cheaper than dealing with them later.
People have told me that the new “Planned Choice” organization would be without funds. I doubt this, because of the large amount of public support for Planned Parenthood. I think that it would not be difficult to raise private funds for “Planned Choice”, given the issues at play. Announce the decision in advance, ask for subscriptions or regular monthly donations, it should not be difficult to find donors.
===========
In closing, I invite everyone to cut each other some slack on this issue. My conclusions and choices may be very different from yours, but I assure you that just like yours, my conclusions are the result of long deliberation and contemplation of the issues …
In consideration of that, please do your best to constrain your comments to this proposal about Planned Parenthood. This is not the place to decide the underlying questions about abortion—they are far too complex and personal to be settled on the web. I’m just looking for a way to move past the current impasse regarding Planned Parenthood in such a way that we can allow the government to keep funding the valuable reproductive health services it provides.
Best to everyone,
w.
Just like always, I politely request that if you are commenting please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING, so we can all see just what you are referring to.
Skating Under The Ice 
The true sickness of modern progressive feminism was on full display when Lena Dunham publicly lamented never having an abortion, simply for the experience of it. That’s sick.
From: http://thefederalist.com/2016/12/22/lena-dunham-accidentally-confessed-the-truth-about-abortion/
““Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had,” the creator of HBO’s “Girls” said in her most recent episode of her podcast. Unsurprisingly, her remark offended a lot of people who thought Dunham’s comment showed an alarming lack of empathy for women who have experienced reproductive challenges or undergone an abortion.”
———————————–
Because the huge backlash she walked back the statement and apologized. But she clearly felt that way.
But Lena Dunham’s rabid-brand of feminism is representative of everything about the PP hard core supporters. Just hint at a threat to touch their tax dollar funding, and they go ballistic. As a group they are Worse by an order of magnitude that the climate cultists.
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Thanks for that correspondent’s report from Bedlam, Joel. Lena Dunham? Why would anyone pay the slightest attention to her? She’s had her 15 minutes of fame, and now that she’s jumped the shark she’s desperately trying to stay in the limelight …
w.
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A wise idea, Schlomo; split the baby. Abortions must be separated from the other works PP does, and I’m not convinced PP should get any public funding. To use your example, public funding should not be given to, say, gun ranges to teach firearm safety.
By comparison to another hot political potato, gay marriage should be made legal across the country because being married confers legal benefits and responsibilities by the national, as well as the state governments and the XIV amendment requires equal protection of the law to all citizens. (I think the Supremes screwed the pooch on Roe v. Wade, but that’s another states’ rights can of worms they’re always opening.)
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Gay marriage is a topic for a different post. It also deserves the Schlomo treatment. In brief, marriage as a religious rite should be removed from government involvement. Further, it’s not for the government to get involved with sex. The part which the government should keep is the contract aspect, the business of combining two individual ‘businesses’ into one, including dissolution of the partnership and assets, and inheritance.
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Planned Parenthood already spun off their abortion business. The non-abortion business is now the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which does R&D related to abortion. The abortion business is now called Planned Parenthood.
Unless you think slaughtering hundreds of thousands of babies, shielding child prostitution from the law, flagrantly lying, trafficking in aborted baby body parts, etc., is “good,” Planned Parenthood does nothing good of any significance. The other “services” they provide are really marketing strategies for their core business, which is killing babies. “Educational” services in schools, pregnancy tests, etc., are all designed to help get prospective clients in the door, in the future, for abortions.
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Dave, I think your ideology may be affecting your eyesight. Many of the women going to Planned Parenthood go because they can get inexpensive pre-natal medical checkups. Many of the women going to Planned Parenthood get information about nutrition to keep their babies developing properly. Many of the women going to Planned Parenthood go for cholesterol screening, or for information about how their diabetes will affect their unborn baby, or for sports physicals, or pregnancy tests, or for help quitting smoking and drinking when they are pregnant, or for any of the dozens of other services and support that PP provides.
You gotta be way into ideology, a goodly distance from actual logic, and far too dismissive of the humanity of the people involved, to accuse PP of providing those services merely so that they can perform abortions. Seriously, amigo, you are claiming that cholesterol screening and smoking cessation programs are gateway drugs for abortions … doesn’t do your reputation lots of good. The real numbers are that about 10% of the women seen by PP get an abortion. The other 90% get other services.
You’re more than welcome to your own opinion, and I strongly support your promoting it. However, you don’t get your own facts, and the facts are that most of the work that PP does has nothing to do with abortion..
w.
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Willis, that’s Planned Parenthood’s propaganda. They lie.. They make Michael Mann look like a paragon of honesty, by comparison.
Did you click the Heritage link? Here’s an excerpt:
(Note that in the USA pregnant mothers typically have at least a dozen or more prenatal care visits with their doctors, per pregnancy.)
My pharmacist has a candy dish on the counter, with free lollipops. But that doesn’t make them a candy store. They wouldn’t be a candy store even if they charged for the lollipops.
The fact that Planned Parenthood clinics sometimes sell services other than abortions doesn’t make them healthcare providers. They are abortion providers, who sometimes do other things. Their bread-and-butter is killing unborn children.
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Dave, FactCheck.org disagrees strongly with your claims, viz:
The article explains how the Heritage Foundation came to the wrong conclusions …
Finally, I’ve never understood people’s insistence that they be allowed to regulate other people’s abortions … Dave, perhaps you could tell us whether you think your particular parochial views about conception should be imposed on my daughter by force of law, and if so, why?
Best regards,
w.
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Willis, I think you may have used the wrong link. That FactCheck article does not “explain how the Heritage Foundation came to the wrong conclusions,” nor does it “disagree strongly” with my claims. It doesn’t even mention Heritage or their article.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org, leans sharply to the Left. If you doubt that, then take a look at how they spin climate issues. (You could counter that Heritage leans to the right, which I would not dispute.) So FactCheck is a questionable authority w/r/t politicized topics like the climate scare and killing unborn babies.
But, even so, that FactCheck article isn’t about either my claims or Heritage’s. It is about claims made my some other people, that abortion either accounts for 94% of PP’s business, or else accounts for 94% of their pregnancy-related business. (The latter claim might be true, but is not something that either I or Heritage said.)
As for my “particular parochial views about conception,” it is simply this: killing babies is Wrong. It is so egregiously wrong that it ought to be illegal, except in very rare & tragic special circumstances.
Lying is wrong, too, almost always. PP’s claim that abortions are only 3 percent of their business is wildly dishonest. Have you ever heard of another business, any other business, which described the proportions of their business in terms of “discrete interactions” with customers, instead of in terms of revenue or profit?
The purpose of PP’s “3%” claim is to mislead.
Most automobile dealers’ contacts with customers do not result in selling a car. Most of them do more oil changes than car sales. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t primarily in the business of selling cars.
Imagine a car dealer which advertised that only 3% of its business was selling cars, and justified it because they do a lot more oil changes and tire rotations than car sales. Would you buy a used car from that guy?
In terms of revenue generated, Planned Parenthood’s abortion business dwarfs every other “service” they perform.
Their business is not prenatal care, or adoption referrals, or routine medical exams, even though some PP clinics do some of those things. Their business is abortion.
Since PP performs ~20 abortions for every prenatal care visit, and there are about a dozen prenatal care visits associated with a typical non-aborted pregnancy in America, that obviously means the number of women depending on PP for prenatal care is vanishingly small, compared to the number who get abortions there. Even though some Planned Parenthood affiliates do the occasional prenatal care exam or annual checkup, the main business of Planned Parenthood is killing babies.
Even the left-leaning Washington Post admits that Planned Parenthood lies about how much of their business is abortion:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/08/12/for-planned-parenthood-abortion-stats-3-percent-and-94-percent-are-both-misleading/
The WaPo was very generous to Planned Parenthood when they rated Planned Parenthood’s claim that only 3% of their business is abortion as only “Three Pinocchios.”
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Thanks, Dave. I understand your passion and your position. I think you are wrong about Planned Parenthood. However, as I said, we won’t settle this here. I would like to return your attention to my proposal that the organization be split into “Planned Parenthood” and “Planned Choice”. It provides a practical method to determine just how much is one and just how much is the other.
Since you continue to insist that you be given authority to interfere with my daughter’s right to choose what she can and cannot do in this regard, an authority that I neither have nor want as her father, AND AN AUTHORITY THE SUPREME COURT HAS CLEARLY RULED THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE, I fear we’ll have to agree to disagree …
Regards,
w.
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Wilis, I think you have hit on a decent solution. PP has prevented more unwanted children than it has aborted, the work they do is priceless to the entire country. Considering some of the wacko projects our government supports, at least PP earns their funding.
PMK
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I agree, Planned Parenthood does provide some of the same necessary functions in minority neighborhoods as rural health clinics do out in the boondocks, and at least in our current health system should be funded accordingly, but only if the abortion functions are separated as Willis suggests. If there is actually that much support for abortion the new entity should have no problem getting donations, unless of course that support is only vocal and from that section of society that is totally willing to commit our money but not its own.
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Once a society accepts, even demands, other people’s money be forceably taken and spent on free stuff for other people, it really does abdicate any say in how the plunder is spent as this will be arbitrary, subjective, open to corruption and cronyism.
The start point is to stop the plundering, then the issue of how the plunder is spent does not arise.
Taxation is theft; Government is an extortion and protection racket.
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“Taxation is theft”??? Do you expect to pay for the US Army from your own pocket? If you think taxation is theft, why are you still here in the US? Go find your tax-free homeland.
What’s that, you say? Every country imposes taxes? Well, THINK ABOUT WHY THAT MIGHT BE THAT EVERYONE EVERYWHERE HAS INSTITUTED TAXES … kinda makes you think they might be a necessary evil, I hope.
w.
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Taxation for funding operation of the federal government outside its enumerated powers is theft. Although it may start out well-intended, it inevitably decays to corruption and cronyism, and hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been misspent, misallocated and frankly misappropriated.
The founders of this country foresaw the evils of centralization of power, and specifically tried to design the constitution to avoid exactly what we have today: a remote and vastly wealthy central capitol micro-managing the lives of citizens for their own power and personal enrichment, just as it was with the British King at the time of the birth of this nation.
The federal government has no business in any of this. Leave it to the states so that the decision-making is closer to the people it actually affects.
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Johnny Green January 9, 2017 at 6:12 pm
Then why the heck didn’t you say that to start with? Why give me the usual BS about “Taxation Is Theft!”.
Yep.
I’m sorry, this is not clear. What is “any of this”? Any of what?
Finally, you sound like a strict Constitutionalist, which on my planet is generally a good thing with one exception.
Time.
Time has brought us new things that the founders didn’t imagine in their wildest dreams. Atom bombs. Airplanes. Radios. The internet. Space exploration.
For example. the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. At the time that meant moving real goods from state to state by barge, ship, and mule team.
Does this power extend to say regulating the internet?
There is no perfect answer to that, because the internet is a whole new paradigm undreamed of at the time. Now, the Courts in general have taken a broad interpretation of the commerce clause, for that particular reason—there is no perfect answer, things we have now they didn’t have then, so you kind of have to think about “commerce” in a larger fashion than just barges and wagon trains. You can’t say “well, the internet isn’t mentioned in the constitution so the government can’t regulate it”.
Same thing with the concept of airspace, and the right to control the airspace around say an airport. Find me that right in the Constitution. They never dreamed of having a need to regulate airspace and who can use it … but obviously it has to be done at a Federal level (in fact a world level). You can’t have every state with different airport lights and runway markings and radio protocols …
Same thing with the right to bear arms. Does “arms” just include muzzleloading muskets and the like, the personal defense weapons of that time?
And if the right to bear arms is not limited to muskets, jus how far out does the right to bear arms extend?
For example, do US citizens have a right to own nuclear weapons? I think every sane person says no to that … but that means that we have to draw the line somewhere. So where do we draw it? What is out and what is in? Howitzers? Rocket propelled grenades? Machine guns?
I’m sure you can see the problem. Even with the best of motives, the Framers couldn’t foresee this world. So we have to do our best to guesstimate what they would do in their wisdom. And there is no way to know with certainty what they would have done, wise as they were. No easy answers there, I fear.
And nobody can claim that they have the right answer, myself included. Nobody truly knows how the Founders would have regulated rocket propelled grenades.
All the best,
w.
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If I was running Planned Parenthood and believed that our mission included providing abortions and “providing a wide variety of prenatal counseling, information and solutions,” I wouldn’t publically support a split. I would stonewall any suggestion of a split right up to the day before all government funding for the whole organization stopped. Then I would reluctantly agree to splitting into two separate organizations.
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rovingbroker January 8, 2017 at 7:20 am
So that you could end up with two organizations both with no funds???? Where’s the upside in that?
Me, I’d announce the spin-off (not a split) early. That way the funding of PP itself could continue uninterrupted.
w.
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What I find offensive is the hypocrisy of allowing abortions while at the same time not allowing assisted suicide. To me it is much more appropriate for a living person to decide on his own life or death than it is to allow someone else to decide on the life or death of the unborn.
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I think you will find most people supporting abortion also support assisted suicide and likewise on the other side of the question. The word you want here is not hypocrisy but “inconsistency”. This is because assisted suicide has been left to the various state legislatures whereas abortion was enabled by the Supreme Court. Inconsistency is pretty much guaranteed by a Federal system.
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Thanks for those comments.
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I find it disturbing that a body consisting of 80% of men considers something that impacts 0% of men.
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A bumper sticker I saw: Against abortion? Don’t get one.
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so 0% of the aborted babies would be male? and they didn’t have fathers?
At some point in the pregnancy, it’s not just the body of the mother. debate on where that point is is fair game, but by the time that the baby could survive with a c-section that point has passed. At that point there are two lives/bodies involved, not just the woman’s.
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David, I don’t want to charge criminally for every sperm that does not fertilize an egg. Or for every egg that does not get fertilized. Reproduction is a wasteful business. I don’t believe in the rights of the unborn. I believe in the rights of potential parents.
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@CG
I’m not saying that it’s right to charge for every sperm that does not fertilize an egg. I’m not even saying that it’s right to charge for a ‘morning after’ pill. I’m also not saying that flushing potential in-vitro fertilization results is a problem.
All I’m saying is that there is some point before birth where the unborn becomes a person, and that that point is someplace before the point where the unborn can survive outside the mother.
where between the point of conception and the point where the unborn would survive in the hospital the line is crossed, I don’t know. That is where I say there is room for real debate.
I’m an honorary uncle for a 5-year old who was delivered almost three months premature because they were concerned that her mother would not survive the day without them taking action. but according to some, the child was just some meaningless growth that had no more meaning than cutting your hair. At the same time, that mother has been told that if she were to try to have another child, she would be required to remain in bed for the entire pregnancy and still would be very unlikely to survive it. This is a clear case where Abortion very early on if justified to protect the life of the mother (not desirable, better to prevent the conception in the first place, but justified)
as I understand things, there are societies in history that did not name their children before their first birthday (because it was so common for them to not make it to that point, they weren’t considered ‘real people’ yet)
At some point, this discussion is going to get even more interesting when we can grow a person from in-vitro fertilization to birth without a host body being involved.
Willis asked us not to try and argue the right vs wrong of abortion, but I just couldn’t stand by and ignore the “men are not affected and have no right to an opinion” comment.
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David, that point is well defined, it is call a birth. You probably know your date of birth. You probably don’t know your date of conception. You are trying to replace traditional well-defined concepts with foggy new ones.
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David, as Bear reports below, only 0.01% of abortions are performed in the third trimester. I assume that most of them are based on a medical necessity – while your honorary nephew is not a product of an abortion, you illustrate the difficult decisions the doctors have to make. I would leave those decisions to doctors, not to politicians. What qualification does a politician need? What are the qualifications of Bernie Sanders? I don’t trust a body whose member is a Hon. Hank Johnson (D-GA) who worries that the island of Guam may capsize.
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> that point is well defined, it is call a birth
it’s not as well defined as you want to make it out to me. People regularly get charged with murder for the death of the unborn, just not if it happens in an abortion clinic. (look for cases where a pregnant woman is injured or killed)
I agree the line is not clear-cut, but making it be the moment of birth leads to abominations like partial birth abortions.
I’m just saying that if birth is a viable option, then it’s too late for it to be a ‘just a bunch of cells” abortion.
There are times when it’s unfortunately required to sacrifice one life to save others, I’m not arguing against that, but such cases need to be treated like exceptions, not just “It’s the woman’s body, she has the right to do anything with it”
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David, we mostly agree. I happen to be concerned about efficiency. I think a law should not attempt to cover the last 0.01% (or a little more) of cases. These should be handled individually. Not by a law passed by ignorants. I always think of Nancy Pelosi’s immortal words on Obamacare: “Don’t read it. Just vote for it.”
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Yes, women alone should be entitled to discuss their ‘rights’. Of course, nothing in this should suggest to men they can get out of their duty by paying the bills.
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I just wonder if that’s another stumbling block the Barack is trying to create for the Donald.
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Willis created the acronym DOTUS, I propose BOTUS for the Barack. 😎
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When Blackmun wrote the opinion representing the majority in “Roe V Wade” he reflected a majority of the voters of his time, and ours. His opinion necessarily used, and popularized, an unscientific concept — the “tri-mester”. In the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, the government has no business having an opinion nor setting legal requirements on a family’s choices. In the weeks 13-24, there are complications, and different communities and states might want to decide things differently one from another. In the weeks 25 and later, the unborn are human beings who do have rights, which states MUST decide about protecting and balancing in view of the rights of their mothers (also human beings.)
“Anywhere, anytime, any reason” is NOT what our Supreme Court expected abortion law to look like. Kermit Gosnell is not a result of carefully crafted and reasonably enforced state law. And encouraging surgeons to alter procedures nominally “preserving the health of the mother” in order to harvest, for resale, the body organs of their 25-week and older babies is not a decision involving parenthood or family planning.
When any institution wanders SO far from the spirit of the law there needs must be corrections. Cutting funding is a modest first step.
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An abortion is frequently a desperate attempt to get rid of an undesired side effect of sex.Do you have statistical data on a percentage of abortions performed in the first, second, and third trimester? Are we discussing 97% or 3% or 0.3%?
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Here’s the numbers from Fox News dated 2003
Of the 1.6 million abortions performed in the U.S. each year, 91 percent are performed during the first trimester (12 or fewer weeks’ gestation); 9 percent are performed in the second trimester (24 or fewer weeks’ gestation); and only about 100 are performed in the third trimester (more than 24 weeks’ gestation), approximately .01 percent of all abortions performed.
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Here are later statistics from the CDC though not all states seem to have reported:
Total abortions: 664,435 with not all areas reporting
The majority of abortions in 2013 took place early in gestation: 91.6% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions (7.1%) were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer (1.3%) were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation.
That’s over 8,000 in the ≥21 weeks number. Interesting that CDC doesn’t report by trimester and even more interesting that California and New York state doesn’t report all (though NY City does).
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One of impetus for repealing Obamacare has been its use of mandates; that is, the Feds telling people what to do, and in this case, a mandate for birth control coverage. Certainly Planned Parenthood is part of that mandate.
To my way of thinking, the mandates, the ones advocated by the feminist movement to include Planned Parenthood were necessary for the feminist’s by-in to help push this health care law through Congress. As a constituency for the new healthcare law, feminists were not going to sit back and watch their particular perspective be stripped by later Congressional actions.
Obamacare has other mandates which help galvanize the current coalition to repeal Obamacare in its entirety. Kind of like a lethal ingredient which kills the whole program: good, bad and just ugly.
The evolution of women’s reproductive health care more likely than not will be the OverTheCounter availability of several birth control agents including “the Pill”, abortive agents. Items like IUD and injectable birth control would likely still need medically trained practitioners and their related added costs.
It is more likely than not that the evolution in perceptions around having children and in particular the number of children will return to a view of potential parents to now want children because circumstances in their lives have changed in the direction of Dad & Mom & one or more children. There may be Federal dollars for families to start having children for the economic health of our country. This is similar to China not only to eschew the “one child policy” but now paying women to have their IUD removed.
OTC and generic contraceptive products will reduce the need for an abortion option which in turn reduces the need for the wide availability of such services. Funding for abortions would be available through feminist organizations.
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would it be impolite to query why I am in moderations?
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Power outage at Chez Willis, big rainstorm, trees hit power lines … a usual winter, in other words.
Sorry for the delay,
w.
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I give money to pp. it is my single biggest charitable donation. I would designate my money to provide abortions for low income women. I have often thought if all the big buck democrats would put there money where there mouth is the US government would be out of the equation.
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The swiss flying ambulance REGA has a sponsorship model: you sponsor it with CHF 30 a year for a single person, CHF 70 a year for a family or a farmer, and if ever you or your family or your cow
needs to be rescued by chopper it’s free.
I think a similar model would work well. You pay your yearly 20 bucks and if ever your girlfriend or daughter
has a real problem, money won’t be an issue.
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“My conclusions and choices may be very different from yours,…”
In this case they are similar enough that I don’t find anything worth posting in disagreement.
I have no problem with taxpayers supporting “planning parenthood”, since that is beneficial to our society. In the US, there are legal and illegal abortions. Taxpayers should not be supporting anything illegal. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
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Why shouldn’t men have some say in whether or not their child gets to live?
I don’t think it should be illegal or even hard to get an abortion, but I think we need a big rethinking of why this is a better option than adoption.
If more children were put up for adoption then we wouldn’t have to outsource our child rearing to third world countries.
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Because they often don’t stay around to care and pay for the kid?
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On a related note, for those thinking that the government is not doing enough for the elderly, there’s an innovative German plan here.
w.
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Well, that’s a novel approach to assisted suicide.
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First decent idea the Greens have come up with…. write it off to prostate health?
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Willis,
Upthread you asked
—
Finally, I’ve never understood people’s insistence that they be allowed to regulate other people’s abortions … Dave, perhaps you could tell us whether you think your particular parochial views about conception should be imposed on my daughter by force of law, and if so, why?
—
My read is that Dave’s not trying to regulate your daughter’s contraception choices as much as protect your grandchild’s right to not be murdered.
Please not that I’m not endorsing his view, but unless you understand what he’s trying to regulate you’re doomed to argue past each other.
It looks to me like most abortion noise is based on the fact that at some point your daughter transitions from having a growth to having a human passenger. I can’t imagine any amount of internet yelling is going to change anybody’s mind about when that occurs.
Thanks for all the free ice cream, both here and at Watts,
A W
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Thanks, Andrew. I understand that Dave wants authority over both my daughter and my grandchild that I neither have nor would want to have.
I also understand that he believes it is for the highest of motives.
Me, not so much.
w.
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Willis, We also regulate the ability for a Muslim father to have his daughter stoned for embarrassing the family. Sometimes protecting the life of an innocent trumps other people’s rights to do whatever they want.
But that’s not the topic at hand, the topic at hand is forcing people who believe that this is murder to pay for it (either through their taxes in payments to PP, or through their health insurance premiums)
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Willis et al: By law Planned Parenthood is prohibited from using Federal money for abortions. Otherwise they do much good work for pregnant women.
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Yes, the Hyde Amendment. Problem is, money is fungible, and bookkeeping is easily funged (not a word, I know). Willis’s suggestion of splitting PP in two could solve that problem, as he suggests, but not, as others have said, the inhumane practice of killing unborn children; just Federal funding of it.
/Mr Lynn
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That should have been ‘inhuman’, not ‘inhumane’.
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I believe the word is fungled…maybe not?
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@Willis
I guess we reached the limit of the depth of replies.
Well, strict in the sense that the Constitution has provisions for amendment, which again were deliberately designed for certain reasons.
If there is a need for the federal government to modify the enumerated powers, then it should not seek to do so via the Supreme Court or back-door regulation but instead should make its intention explicit and (ask the States to) amend the Constitution.
For other issues that needn’t be federal in scope (such as “funding” various things — “funding” in this context is involuntary wealth transfer, to which I am vigorously opposed), if private sources of cash can’t be found, then the citizens of a state (or, more ideally, a county) can decide through whatever processes they choose whether they want some of their tax money used for “funding” certain undertakings.
This gives individual citizens a means of escaping tyranny: they can move to another state or county (as they are doing, for example, from Kookafornia to Texas), and is the preeminent reason the powers of the federal government were so strictly circumscribed.
As a case study, let’s consider medical care. The population of Denmark is around 5 million, and they have “free” medical care. In the United States, there are around 60 times the number of people there are in Denmark, so surely 5 million people could get together (maybe on a geographic basis, maybe, in the Internet age, on some other basis) and make their own medical care system that would provide all the benefits of that in Denmark, which is so commonly held out to be the exemplar of “free” medical care. Why hasn’t this happened?
Why must I, through my “insurance”, be forced to pay for the abortions or “gender reassignments” of others if I don’t care to do that (for whatever reason, but mainly because I need my money for something else)? Surely 5 million people could get together and decide that they were going to pay for each others’ abortions or birth control, with membership in the group being strictly voluntary? Why bring me into it, when I have need of neither abortions nor gender reassignment?
The conclusion you must reach is that the money I earn is required to subsidize abortions and birth control because if people agree to pay for each others’, then they may as well pay for their own, which they clearly don’t want to do.
So the easy answer for the people who want free stuff is to use the most powerful political entity (the federal government) to expropriate the wealth of the least powerful (the individual), and that’s immoral because it’s tantamount to theft.
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Hi Willis,
I forget the name of the doctor who wrote the article and can’t find it… though I do remember the basics of what he said as it stuck in my head. He states that it is never ever necessary to perform an abortion to save the mother’s life, yes they may need to induce labor or otherwise deliver the baby ASAP but there is no medical need to kill the baby prior to birth/removal, and it is possible that the baby is not developed enough to survive after birth but that is not the same as aborting it. He also stated that the primary thing that abortion save’s is the mother’s lifestyle! While I have spent most of my adult life thinking that the right to an abortion was a “woman’s right to choose” and never believed that abortion should be used as post-facto birth control, the comments by the doctor I referred to made me rethink my position. I still believe that in cases of incest and rape that abortion should be an option or “allowed” but for the other cases if the baby needs to be delivered prematurely to save the mother’s life, there still needs to be consideration for the baby’s life and an attempt to save it if possible. This current and prevalent use of abortion as birth control is wrong, perhaps if abortion was not so readily available and paid for by the tax payer these same folks would have to accept responsibility for actually using birth control rather than just opting for abortion to bail them out of their own stupidity.
Joe!
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@joe
Past some point in development, I almost agree with you [1], but early in the pregnancy inducing labor is not an option, and a c-section to remove the baby that has no chance of survival imposes a risk on the mother for no benefit.
[1] I can think of extreme situations where surgery on the mother to remove the baby would put her life at risk, but they would be just that, extreme situations and exceptions.
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Hi Willis,
just wondering why my comment got disappeared?
Thanks,
Joe
ps- this would be my first time commenting on your site but this is my id and email that I have commented with many times on WUWT.
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“The fact that something is legal, or even that it is a right which is protected by the Constitution, does NOT necessarily mean that taxpayer money should support it.”
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“The freedom of thought, speech and civil rights does NOT necessarily mean that taxpayer money should support it.”
It should rain like Manna from heaven, tax free.
The denomination herefore is ‘claim-thinking’.
Willis, you never were in need for abortion personally. My guessing.
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Yes, I like that my comment is still awaiting –
Johann Wundersamer on January 12, 2017 at 7:14 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
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Willis, you’re pregnant not wanting abortion?
show me your belly on youtube and tell me, lil’l mam’.
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Johann, the first time you comment it is held for approval. I’m the only one here to do moderating. The power has been out for three days. The road in and out has been blocked.
And you whine to me because your comment was not approved WITHIN EIGHT MINUTES?
And when it is not answered in eight minutes you get all snarky, and call me names?
Sounds like a first world problem to me, amigo … you’re on thin ice here. Act nice or you’re out of here. You don’t walk into my house and start right out of the box by insulting me. Bad idea.
w.
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Hi Willis, a very good blog and deep and interesting thoughts. Especially for me as a German it gives me some insight into the American culture. Of course, you are no Typical American, are you? If there is any.
Are you aware how Germany is handling the problem? They have a rather interesting approach:
1. Any abortion is illegal.
2. For abortion up to 3 month there is no prosecution.
3. Any costs of birth control and for abortion are covered by the public health insurances.
4. Birth control advice and abortion is carried out by the normal medical sector.
For me it is somhow illogical that healt insurances pay for somthing which is a duty of the whole state.
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Thanks, Johannes. If you are looking for something logical, politics wouldn’t be my first choice …
Welcome to the blog,
w.
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Hi Willis,
You wrote:
“Here’s my bottom line:
The fact that something is legal, or even that it is a right which is protected by the Constitution, does NOT necessarily mean that taxpayer money should support it.”
I see the problem from a distinct angle:
It is inavoidable (or natural) that young women starting from puberty are becoming pregnant, if there are not taken any measures.
In many cultures motherhood and babies have bee welcomed, and mother and child were supported for the uprising of the little one until it becomes a full member of the soceity. And being a mother often was a honourable matter.
Now in the western world, this support isn’t there anymore. Young pregnant women often are outcasts and bad treated, and not getting enough support (E.g. how to continue education, how to uprise the offspring etc.), if they get no aid from the father of the child or their own parents.
So if the soceity is not caring enough for them and not honouring what they are doing for the soceity, the government at least should pay for proper birth control, if the mothers do decide not to have the child.
Or, the other way round, government/soceity should give a full support for any mother to get an equal chance for mothers to get education and good job opportunity and a warm welcome for the new citicien and a support until it is mature.
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I have been watching the ongoing discussion of Planned Parenthood for about 55 years now. My parents had a subscription to Reader’s Digest, and the pros and cons of creating this organization were discussed in almost every issue. As a child, I didn’t really understand some of it. However, it was clearly stated that an organization such as Planned Parenthood was being created to help out married couples in spacing their children further apart, through the use of birth control, either as The Pill, or as a contraceptive condom. It was also clearly stated that this was never going to be offered to unmarried women. And abortion was simply not mentioned at all, because it didn’t have to be. Abortions were being done in normal hospitals, by normal doctors, usually in the first trimester. They weren’t called abortions, though. They were called D&Cs, which is actually a normal procedure that also happens to terminate any pregnancy. Birth control pills were available through normal doctors. However, normal doctors need to know a person’s real name.
A few years later, I entered my teenage years, and Planned Parenthood was created, with much fanfare, as a boon to married women everywhere. It took just a few years for the floodgates to open, and contraceptives to be offered freely, at a modest price, to anyone who came in. Just a few years later, abortions were being done quietly. Again, this was offered to anyone, regardless of marital status. It appeared to many of us, at the time, that selling birth-control pills was not as lucrative as offering abortions. As usual, follow the money. This was never about some philanthropic do-gooders offering something unique and special. This was always about pushing a political and monetary agenda, and direct interference with the rights of parents.
Why does Planned Parenthood exist, when any services they offer are more safely provided by regular doctors? As a pessimist, I believe it has to do with political donations, and the draw of monetary gain. In addition, the argument has focused just on women. There is just as much, if not more, need for men’s specific medical problems to be attended to. But men are, again, being accorded a lesser status, in the name of political correctness.
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Janice, as I said, we can solve all of this easily by simply splitting the organization in two.
As to safe abortions, my mother nearly died from a miscarriage she brought on herself because she couldn’t deal with the four kids she already had, and she knew that a fifth child would push her over the edge and we’d all be without a mother.
I think she was right, in that she went over the edge anyhow once her four kids were old enough … it is definitely not a simple question with a simple answer.
My best to you,
w.
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I understand the emotional response to Planned Parenthood. I simply consider it a political entity, as opposed to a medical one. If Planned Parenthood had spent their time and energy, by pushing reversible tubal ligation and reversible vasectomies, I would think they would be closer to what they advertised as being, back before they were formed. We don’t need abortion mills, we need sensible solutions that will prevent pregnancies. On top of which, nobody ever talks about young women giving their babies up for adoption, which is a completely viable alternative, and much safer than a late-stage abortion. At this point, we aren’t really talking about women’s or men’s health issues, we are simply talking about a political entity that stays in business because they are making money. They don’t make money when they prevent pregnancies, only when they participate in ending them. Follow the money.
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Janice, for someone saying “follow the money” you haven’t provided us with any even attempt to do that. Let me take just one example.
According to the PP Annual report, over four million women were tested for STDs in 2013. Four MILLION!!!
Now, how much would it have cost the US if those women were not tested?
According to the PP Annual report, over three million women were given some kind of birth control in 2013. Three MILLION!!!
What is the cost of the suffering and pain of three million unwanted chlldren to both mother and child?
In addition, another million women got cancer screening, and an additional million got pregnancy tests and prenatal services.
Finally, 327,000 women got abortions from PP over the same period. Less than got prenatal services. Less than got pregnancy tests. Less than got cancer screening. Far less than got STD testing. Far less than got birth control.
So I’m simply not buying your claim that if you “follow the money” you find something terrible. Abortion is not the most of what they do, it’s not the main of what they do. It is a minority of what they do.
However, let me say again that we will not settle this here or perhaps anywhere. As a result, I say the best thing to do is to spin off the abortion related business as “Planned Choice”. That way we won’t have these endless debates about the question. The government can fund the new slimmer Planned Parenthood, and “Planned Choice” can raise its own funds.
w.
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