First is the claim that Planned Parenthood is all about sex education and healthcare services. First of all increased birth control does not lower the number of abortions. There are plenty of facts out there and I won't be repeating them, but here is a link with more information with studies and numbers for anyone that is interested. Another thing is that many of the women sitting in abortion clinics were using some form of contraception that failed. In all the sex ed classes given to kids there is never a talk about the failure rate of any or all contraception methods. There are studies out there that prove this, but the way that I learned for myself was to talk to post-abortive women. Most of them had a similar story "I was so careful, and don't know how this happened." Not only post abortive women, but I myself said those word 3 times in my life when my birth control failed. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which is the research arm of Planned Parenthood, approximately one half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. Out of those unintended pregnancies 42% are due to non-use of contraceptives. So, that leaves 58% that are due to failed or misuse of contraceptives. Therefore giving out more contraceptives will not help lower the rate of unintended pregnancies. The fact is that kids know about birth control, they know about condoms, they are well aware of how to prevent pregnancy but for whatever reason the contraceptives fail or aren't properly used. My thought is that if a person isn't responsible enough to feed a crying baby then what makes us think they are responsible enough to properly use contraceptives?
Now let's talk about the services that Planned Parenthood offers other than abortion. Such as giving out birth control pills, cancer screenings and pap smears. According to people like my classmate and Nancy Pelosi women will not be able to get those services if Planned Parenthood doesn't have federal funds. But the fact is that there are 7,000 Federally Qualified Healthcare Centers nationally compared to only 700 Planned Parenthood clinics. They are local community clinics that provide a full comprehensive range of healthcare services for low income women and families. They offer full services including everything from birth control to pediatrics to dental care to general family doctors. You can't go to Planned Parenthood for all of those services, only for a limited range of services. In Austin the FQHC is called The LoneStar Circle of Care. I don't have insurance and that is where I go for my healthcare. So women have other options for healthcare, in fact we have better options for healthcare than Planned Parenthood.
About the 3% of Planned Parenthood's services are abortions. There are many ways that they get to that percentage, one of them being that they unbundle services. In other words abortion is 1 service and then they separate birth control, pap smear, cancer screening and pregnancy test as 4 services. So, one appointment looks like it is just one service and the other appointment looks like 4 services even though each appointment was only one client. Even NPR had to admit that 1 out of 10 Planned Parenthood clients go into the clinic for an abortion.
Finally about Planned Parenthood, this organization has a history that should make people shutter. The founder of Planned Parenthood was Margaret Sanger who was a racist eugenic who had admired Hitler. There is no way for me to really convince anyone of that, that is where someone will have to do their own research into who she was. I started by watching a movie called "Maafa 21", and going from there.
As for the issue of abortion being a woman's right to do with her body and the "thing" not feeling any of it, all I can say is that this statement proves that people do need to be educated, but instead of educating them about contraceptives, they need to learn fetal development. I saw a sonogram of my grandchild at 7 weeks and watched his/her heartbeat. If a heart beating in a fetus that has human DNA doesn't prove the person-hood of the fetus, then what does? By week 5 of gestation an embryo develops a brain and spinal cord, which is part of the central nervous system, if I'm not wrong. At the moment of conception the zygote has his/her own DNA that will never again be repeated. That DNA will determine all of the child's sex and traits. At 10 weeks the fetus has everything he/she needs, the only thing left is to grow. At this point when a woman has an abortion by suction the fetus is suctioned out of the uterus. The fetus is vacuumed out of the uterus and torn apart. In order to make sure there are no parts of the fetus left in the woman's uterus the clinic workers have to sift out the contents of the abortion and piece together the fetus limb by limb. All anyone has to do is research former abortion clinic workers, and hear their stories of what it is like to work in one.
The reason that I am pro-life really doesn't have anything to do with being Catholic. I was pro-choice when I first became Catholic, and I planned to stay that way. In fact, the reason that I even started researching Planned Parenthood and abortion was because I wanted to work at Planned Parenthood and help people. It had nothing to do with my religion. I thought pro-lifers were nutcases. There are many other pro-lifers who used to be pro-choice and came to the conclusions that I have through research and knowledge. While I think that my classmate doesn't have any ill intentions in her opinion that Planned Parenthood should receive federal funding, I do think that she is greatly misinformed.
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