Imagine looking down at your body and finding a small creature attached to your skin. It has been there for a few weeks and has the potential to permanently ruin your health, financial stability, and career. There is a safe way to remove this being, however you are being forced to let the unanticipated being stay on your body and jeopardize your future. This is a violation of bodily autonomy, which is a basic human right that means each person has the power to self determine what happens to their body. Even those who have passed have to give consent while they’re living before their organs are permitted to be removed. So, why is it that politicians want to force all women to remain pregnant for 9 months, even without their consent?
To enforce strict reproduction laws against women, many people in the government and across the country have been fighting to defund the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) or Planned Parenthood, a non-profit organization that provides reproductive health care for both men and women.
Nearly 100 years ago, Margaret Sanger opened a small birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. Impoverished women with overwhelmingly large families that they could not support would go to the clinic for advice about how to avoid pregnancy and the dangers of horrific, occasionally life-threatening, self-administered abortions. Nine days after the clinic opened, Sanger and two other associates were jailed for breaking the New York State law that prohibited contraception. Today, the organization directly provides sexual education and a variety of reproductive health services, contributes to reproductive technology research, and does advocacy work aimed at protecting and expanding reproductive rights (Wikipedia).
A century after its founding, the organization is one of the most divisive issues in American politics. It has come under attack by Republican presidential candidates seeking to revoke the group’s federal funding—nearly half of its $1-billion budget comes from state and federal sources. Last year the House of Representatives voted to withdraw some of its support, but the edict was not maintained by the Senate. While running for president in the 2012 election, Republican Mitt Romney vowed to completely demolish it’s federal funding if elected. This was appealing to some people, because Planned Parenthood has come to symbolize abortion, which it has been providing since 1970. But behind all the rhetoric, important facts have gone missing.
For example, the senator of Arizona, John Kyl, declared to the senate that abortion makes up “well over 90 percent” of what Planned Parenthood does. The actual figure is 3%. In fact, clinics of Planned Parenthood perform 1 in 4 abortions that take place in the country, none of which are funded with federal money. However, to some anti-abortion activists, that 3% is reason enough to decimate the organization’s funding. If the government were to do so, it would only send women back into the dark alleys, without actually decreasing the number of abortions.
Historically, women across the globe have attempted to end their unexpected pregnancies whether or not abortion is legal, usually threatening their health and safety by self inducing or seeking an illegal, dangerous procedure. There is little relationship between abortion occurrence and abortion legality. However, there is a strong relationship between abortion safety and abortion legality. “During the 1950s and 1960s, the number of illegal abortions in the United States ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year.Prior to Roe v. Wade, as many as 5,000 American women died annually as a direct result of unsafe abortions.” (Obos Abortion Contributors).
“Today, abortion is one of the most commonly performed clinical procedures in the United States, and the death rate from abortion is extremely low: 0.6 per 100,000 procedures, according to the World Health Organization” (Obos Abortion Contributors). This death rate is nearly ten times less than the supposed death rate of colonoscopies (0.007%) (Gastrointestinal Endoscopy). With the legalization of abortion, women are enabled to obtain timely and sanitary abortions, avoiding complications. In 1970, one in four abortions in the United States took place at or after 13 weeks gestation. In 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 92% of abortions were performed during the first trimester (64% of which were performed at under eight weeks gestation) (Centers for Disease Control).
More restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. For instance, as Guttmacher Institute explains, the abortion rate is 29 per 1,000 women in Africa, and 32 per 1,000 in Latin America—regions where abortion is, under most circumstances, illegal in most of the countries. The rate is 12 per 1,000 in Western Europe, where abortion is in most cases permitted on vast grounds (Michelle Ye Hee Lee). However, revoking the federal funding of Planned Parenthood isn’t the only way people in Washington have attempted to deter abortion in the U.S.
Since 2010, new state laws have contributed to the closure of over 70 abortion clinics. This was a result of the Planned Parenthood vs. Casey supreme court ruling of 1992 that allowed states to create restrictions without making it excessively difficult for women seeking an abortion. This vague ruling has caused states to pass dozens of laws that target regulation towards abortion providers. Lawmakers have been exceptionally creative in thinking up new restrictions on women and the clinics that serve them. And when they do, they always say their only concern is for women’s heath and safety, a claim so notably dishonest that it’s surprising they can make it through their sentence without laughing every time.
In 2013, a law was passed in Texas that held the clear intent of making abortions nearly impossible to obtain. One of the hidden restrictions in this law is called “admitting privileges”. The law requires that in order for a doctor be permitted to demonstrate abortion procedures, they must have admitting privileges at a hospital within a 30 mile radius. As of right now, 11 states have laws that require admitting privileges, 9 of which being passed within the last 6 years. To most people, this rule isn’t completely clear, and seems as if it’s for when a woman needs to be transferred to a hospital if something goes wrong during the abortion procedure.
What “admitting privileges” means is the abortion doctor has permission to admit a patient into the hospital without the other doctors’ approval. However, hospitals do not want to be involved in abortion politics and they very rarely grant admitting privileges to abortion clinic doctors. There has never been a case where a woman has suffered from a bad outcome because her doctor didn’t have admitting privileges, and there is no good reasoning behind anti-abortion activists’ claim that these clinics are a danger to women’s health. This is proof that admitting privileges are a sham that don’t provide any medical purpose, but exist only to put abortion clinics out of business (Paul Waldman).
But abortion rights aren’t the only thing at stake here. Stripping federal funding from Planned Parenthood will also endanger the 97% of its public health work that benefits people directly, and has nothing do to with abortion. 20% of women in America have used these resources, and 75% of them have been reported to have low-incomes. In 2011 alone, it performed tests and treatment for over four million people with STDs. The organization supplied 750,000 exams preventing breast cancer, the most common cancer among women in the U.S. And it performed 770,000 Pap tests to prevent cervical cancer, which, before this screen became widely available, was a leading cause of death among women (“Political Attacks on Planned Parenthood Are a Threat to Women’s Health.”).
Some anti-Planned Parenthood activists do make somewhat reasonable points that can be debated. For instance, one source claimed that Planned Parenthood is independently wealthy, and has no need for governmental assistance. This argument is invalid, because the people who are on government-provided health insurance—Medicaid—have low-incomes. This is relevant because many health care providers do not accept Medicaid patients since the reimbursement is very low. If Planned Parenthood is deprived of the government’s support, these people have no alternative source of women’s healthcare. Many arguments against Planned Parenthood are based off of religious beliefs that claim abortions are a sin. These arguments aren’t necessarily invalid, however the first amendment exhibits the separation of the church and state, and reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” (First Amendment of the Constitution).
Planned Parenthood is a vital piece of our country’s resources. As the founder, Margaret Sanger, once said, “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body”. There is no maternal health without reproductive health. Reproductive health includes family planning, contraception, and access to safe, legal abortions. Planned Parenthood provides basic human rights to women in need, and must be protected at all costs.