COLUMN: Planned Parenthood’s opponents are playing themselves

After playing hide-and-seek with the estimated 18 million Americans slated to lose access to healthcare via the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, House Republicans finally, unceremoniously unveiled a provisional replacement plan on Monday evening. Many are already celebrating the bill as a bipartisan victory, as it will respect some of the ACA’s most popular features, such as allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26 and prohibiting insurers from denying coverage or charging more to patients with preexisting medical problems.

But these compromises belie an underhanded attack on women’s rights buried within the bill’s fine print, and a move that, for all of the unabashed conservative drive to attack women’s bodily autonomy, is ultimately counterproductive to conservatives’ own goals. That attack is the defunding of Planned Parenthood, an organization that serves millions of low-income women, girls, members of the LGBTQ community and, of course, on a particularly relatable note, broke college students with their futures at stake.

Planned Parenthood offers these groups — and many others — crucial healthcare services, STI testing and treatment and the very contraception and sexual education that, frankly, prevent the abortions conservatives so loathe.

It’s no secret that legislative attacks on Planned Parenthood are directly rooted in conservative lawmakers’ disdain for the procedure, and their ultimate political goal of eradicating abortion. It’s funny, then, that they should target the ultimate mechanisms through which unwanted pregnancies and, as a result, abortions are deterred — but more on that later.

At this point, we’ve all heard the talking points cited as often as Planned Parenthood is subjected to political attacks and defamatory conservative propaganda (which is, well, often) — that only 3 percent of the services the organization provides are abortions, and of course, due to the Hyde Amendment, federal funding cannot pay for abortions.

These talking points by Planned Parenthood advocates, while well-meaning, might just be worth reconsidering: To assert that abortions make up little of the services the organization offers almost caters to the conservative narrative that abortion is a shameful procedure, and to state that no federal tax dollars pay for abortion implies that this systemic denial of low-income women’s human rights is somehow justified. It’s as if we’re admitting that there is, indeed, something wrong with prioritizing women’s bodily autonomy and human rights over fertilized eggs and unviable fetuses.

Abortion does not deserve the stigma it is mired in, and pro-choice activists must take care not to legitimize ignorant portrayals of it.

But at the end of the day, believe it or not, pro-choice activists and their opponents share a common goal, and that is the desire to reduce abortions.

Pro-choice activists do so by advocating for accurate sexual health education and access to contraception. Anti-abortion lawmakers seek to do so via needless legal and financial barriers, from imposing medically unnecessary regulatory laws that shut down abortion clinics, to mandated waiting periods rendering the procedure more expensive, to costly fetal burial requirements, to the aforementioned Hyde Amendment and so much more — all of this, on top of reinforcing cultural stigma around the procedure through inaccurate portrayals of it as murder.

These methods yield very different results, as Republicans’ effort to defund Planned Parenthood, if successful, will show. Don’t take my word for it, though. Take a look for yourself at data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the years: The national rate of abortions dropped from 16 abortions for every 1,000 women to 12.5 from the anti-abortion Bush administration to the pro-abortion rights Obama administration, which established the ACA’s contraception mandate and defended Planned Parenthood.

Meanwhile, according to longitudinal research by Guttmacher Institute, restrictions on abortion across different states have almost no effect on the rate at which they occur — they singularly serve to burden and shame women.

We already know, via decades of research and analysis into how access to crucial sexual health resources affect living standards, that defunding Planned Parenthood would very likely be a disaster for low-income women, youth and, essentially, all citizens. The absence of the women’s health organization will probably have long-term, deeply severe consequences on the economy.

But ultimately, conservatives zealously seeking to defund the
organization are playing themselves: Rather than reduce abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies, eliminating the contraception and education Planned Parenthood provides would produce the opposite effect. And as the aforementioned study revealed, myriad restrictions might decrease safe, legal abortion, but will do nothing to prevent dangerous self-terminations and back-alley operations.

The point here is not that Planned Parenthood and the courageous, compassionate work they do every day are only justified because on some level, they ironically advance a conservative goal. Planned Parenthood is legitimate and worthy of respect for no other reason than the fact that, objectively speaking, it saves lives and empowers millions of society’s most vulnerable demographics. Defunding it does not serve to help anyone and least of all — whether they believe it or not — conservatives.

Kylie Cheung is a freshman majoring in journalism and political science. She is also the Editorial Director of the Daily Trojan. Her column,“You do Uterus,” runs every Thursday.