What fools we mortals be.
Scads of state and federal lawmakers, playing God with people’s lives, have struck out against Planned Parenthood in states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and even here in Colorado. The ploy is to try to undermine that organization as part of a reckless effort to scuttle abortions for poor and middle-class women.
I’ll generously say these legislators and governors are seriously misinformed, misled and mistaken. Feeling less generous, more realistic and alarmed, I’ll say they’re fiendish fools.
Not only have many of these lawmakers been waiting for an occasion like the one that beset Planned Parenthood last year, but they’ve been anticipating it, planning for it and, as the story plays out, complicit in it. This latest misguided attack against hard-fought abortion rights comes from an unscrupulous gang of anti-abortion activists deceptively calling themselves the Center for Medical Progress. They sent actors pretending to be medical officials out to “meet” with officials regarding donated fetal tissue. Then they doctored surreptitious videos of the meetings to imply that Planed Parenthood was doing something illegal in fetal research programs it had a part in.
The videos caused a firestorm of controversy, even after it was revealed that the “Center” had purposely deceived the public by editing and fudging the productions. The attack led to investigations in seven states, none of which found any wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood. And in Texas, a grand jury that was asked to find a crime in Planned Parenthood’s dealings instead found corruption in the malevolent attack videos.
Like most Americans, I understand and sympathize with how most people object to abortion. Despite what many anti-abortion-rights activists say in their weird Facebook memes and tweets, I don’t know anyone who thinks abortion is cool or ever takes it lightly. But what they’re absolutely wrong about is that the government, or anyone else, should ever dictate reproduction to a woman. Ever. Abortion is a protected right of privacy between a woman and her physician.
But what these activists are even more mistaken about is that Planned Parenthood is only about abortion, and that promoting these exposed lies in defunding schemes will somehow dramatically turn the tide against abortion rights.
Just how alarming all this can be was made clear this week when GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump politically set fire to himself when he said he would work to outlaw abortion and punish women who obtain one.
These activists are utter and dangerous fools. In another life, I worked for a teen pregnancy program in Denver’s Five Points, long before there was anyplace gentrified and chic to visit near there. I had a front-row seat to how poverty, racism, ignorance and apathy regularly crushed the American Dream out of generations of mostly black and Hispanic teenage girls and boys. It was the sheer lack of quality sex education, accessible birth control and community support that perpetuated generations of babies having babies, and everything overwhelming that comes with it.
I’m not talking just about 17-year-old girls and boys not being able to go to college or finish high school because of pregnancy. I’m talking 13-year-old and 14-year-old boys and girls becoming parents, often with their own parents being no older than about 30.
Those days have finally begun ebbing in metro Aurora and all over the country in a very large part because of Planned Parenthood and similar programs. Not because of the increase in abortion, but because of the increase in cheap and attainable birth control. Once America got past the ludicrous days of thinking we could persuade kids to “just say no,” we were able to get them to see that they had to say “no” unless they had protected sex. And for the past couple of decades, we have increasingly done just that.
If you care about someone other than you and yours, you’re happy to know that millions of lives have been improved by reducing teen pregnancy and the rate of sexually transmitted disease. The lives of these kids have been made exponentially better than those who weren’t so fortunate.
And if you couldn’t care less about what poor strangers do, you are probably happy that billions of taxpayer dollars were not spent on health care and welfare programs for these teen parents and their often medically and financially troubled offspring.
Nobody loses when America partners with programs like Planned Parenthood to provide programs offering reproductive health care for people who can’t get it someplace else. And there are millions of those people, mostly poor and middle class women from all backgrounds.
Well, we’re losing now. The assault against Planned Parenthood by anti-abortion activists has moved from Congress to state legislatures. States that were easy prey to the Planned Parenthood schemers fell fast, such as Texas. Now Florida lawmakers and governors, too, think restricting funds to Planned Parenthood is a good idea for them politically. That kind of pandering hurts real lives.
In an Associated Press story Monday, Diego Espino, a vice president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, said the cut would not force the organization to close any of its 28 health centers in the state. “We’re not going away,” he said. “But this will deprive thousands of women of very essential services.”
Colorado has so far been able to push back against the Center’s fabrications and the anti-abortion activist lawmakers trying to make ill-gotten gains from the controversy.
The reality in those suckered states is that abortion, birth control and sexually-transmitted-disease protection services are still available to men and women of means. It’s the poor and middle class being forced to either forgo it, a dangerous plan with increasingly deadly consequences, or make huge sacrifices people in thoughtful states don’t have to make.
The final hypocritical argument being tossed out by these activists is that sexually transmitted disease, the detriments of teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births can be diminished or curtailed by persuading people to “save themselves” until married and to stay faithful once they are.
Good advice they have no business dictating to others, especially when so many of their peers and prefects banging the drum for that daydream do just the opposite. Consider Jimmy Swaggert, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, John Ensign, James West, Bob Livingston, Mark Sanford and Mark Foley, to name a famous few of America’s most flagrant hypocrites.
Until that perfect world materializes, groups like Planned Parenthood must be able to continue to deal with reality.
We all know what’s at stake here, and when the public pays attention, these anti-abortion schemes evaporate when they’re exposed. What activists are counting on is your apathy.
It may just not seem that important right now. But it’s critical to all of us. Planned Parenthood and similar programs have changed millions of lives for the better and continue to do so. And these programs save all of us the massive expense and heartache of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
If you ignore what these activists are doing now, you won’t be able to when it comes back to haunt us.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Facebook and Twitter or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.