By Dave Andrusko
Ezra Klein
Pro-abortionists are ordinarily much too shrewd to straightforwardly acknowledge the roots of their anti-life ethos. But occasionally the truth shines through the fog machine. And wouldn’t you know it, a recent example would be part and parcel of a defense of Planned Parenthood, whose founder was Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist’s eugenicist.
The column, written by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, was posted last week under the totally misleading headline, “What Planned Parenthood actually does.”
The core of his two-fold defense of PPFA, whose federal funding will continue to be a major fight in the coming days, weeks, and months, begins with the baldface assertion that “abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities,” less than, for example, cancer screening and prevention.
We’ve taken that canard apart umpteen times, so I will be brief. (There are always new people coming to a topic for the first time.)
You fall into PPFA’s trap if you get snared in a back and forth about how PPFA counts “services” versus “visits.” Suffice it to say when it serves PPFA’s calculations it bundles discrete activities together (abortion and abortion-related services) or separates them out (“family planning services,” for example).
But it doesn’t change the bloody reality, which was confirmed by a February 2011 Factsheet from PPFA: 12% of their clientele are abortion clients.
Klein also manages to miss (as Susan Wills noted) “Since 1970, PPFA has aborted an estimated 5,300,000 children, equivalent to the entire population of Colorado” and that abortions produce an estimated 37 percent of clinic income.
The other core component of Klein’s defense of PPFA is his last paragraph: “The fight also isn’t about cutting spending. The services Planned Parenthood provides save the federal government a lot of money. It’s somewhat cold to put it in these terms, but taxpayers end up bearing a lot of the expense for unintended pregnancies among people without the means to care for their children.”
Get it? If THOSE people don’t have abortions wildly out of proportion to their representation in the population, “others” will have to pay for these “unintended pregnancies” who’ve escaped PPFA’s tender mercies.
Where we part come company with Klein is that he would eliminate (for example) the Hyde Amendment to save money. We would maintain Hyde to save LIVES. In fact the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 3) would go further; it would be a permanent prohibition on federal funding of abortion and federal subsidies for health plans that cover abortion
Give Klein credit for an ugly kind of candor. It almost takes your breath away, but is in keeping with the ethos that undergirds PPFA’s view of the world. And if it’s good enough for the largest abortion provider in North America, surely it’s good enough for PPFA’s legion of media defenders.
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