Women’s health care and Logic 101

Maybe a few of us still learn logic in college. If so, you’ll recognize this: If all A is B and all B is C, then all A is C. Of course there were violations of this formula as in: All beagles have floppy ears and all beagles are dogs; therefore all dogs have floppy ears. The conclusion is false because not all dogs are beagles. Like with most things, there are more ways to arrive at the wrong conclusion than there are to arrive at the right conclusion.

Now try this one: Planned Parenthood provides health care for women and conservatives don’t like Planned Parenthood; therefore conservatives don’t favor health care for women. I’ve seen those dots connected this way on three different television news programs and in newspapers and magazines in the past week. The most “objective” of them will admit that Planned Parenthood does a few abortions though not, they quickly add, with public money. At issue is the Perry administration’s refusal to accept federal Medicaid money unless Texas is allowed to exclude Planned Parenthood, the country’s billion-dollar abortion corporation, from the list of eligible health-services vendors. To be clear, it is abortion that social conservatives hate, and not just in the academic way of our moderate friends. Absent the millions they make from abortion, Planned Parenthood would not be as rich, ubiquitous, or controversial. Very few on the wrong side of this fight are really talking about screenings for breast cancer when they say “women’s health care.” They are talking about abortion. Try to touch their funding and you’re accused of waging war on women. For the most part, Americans are letting them get away with it.  

There are two things wrong with the way this debate has been controlled by the pro-abortion media. First, it is unfair to say that the governor cares nothing for women’s health just because he objects to one monstrous non-profit that considers duping women into aborting unborn women an aspect of women’s health care. You don’t have to like Planned Parenthood to have benevolent intent toward their hapless clients and victims. The second problem with the pro-abortion “news-vertisements” I’ve seen is that they disconnect Planned Parenthood from one of their apparent core values. This institution is Big Abortion personified and its news media-provided public relations flacks act as if this part of their work is incidental. But what if it is a small part of their work? Does that really make it a minor thing? I’d venture to guess that few members of the Ku Klux Klan ever burned down a church or attacked a civil-rights worker. A relatively few Nazis had any first-hand role in death camps. I don’t know the percentage of Nazis or Klukkers who actually did terrible things but what if it was only 3 percent? Do the underlying structures and philosophical underpinnings that empower these crimes get a pass? Should they? A person who does breathtaking evil with only one hour of his life each week (less than 1 percent) is still what? Misunderstood?

According to their own 2009 report, Planned Parenthood did about 330,000 abortions that year. This same document states that this number accounts for a mere 3 percent of their client services. Big whoop; so they handed out a lot of contraceptives and referred many women to real medical facilities for breast cancer exams—Planned Parenthood performed more than 20 percent of all legal abortions performed in the United States that year. Perhaps these incidental services also account for more than 3 percent of their annual income. Does any honest person really think Rick Perry is withholding money because he doesn’t want a Planned Parenthood employee to refer someone to a doctor for a mammogram?

Are 330,000 lives an incidental matter? That one-year number is significantly higher than the number of U.S. combat deaths during our four-year involvement in World War II. And the number is clearly not incidental to Big Abortion; try to touch this income stream and you’ll see a response far out of proportion to any paltry 3 percent. Americans are somewhere between foolish and evil to let people convince us it should be incidental to those of us who, through public funding, pay about a third of what it costs Planned Parenthood to build and staff facilities that “also” destroy human life.

Contact Gov. Perry by clicking here to ask him to hold the line on funding for Planned Parenthood in Texas. With millions of dollars on the line, you can be sure that he’s already hearing from Big Abortion.