In search of a truce to end war on Planned Parenthood

The ongoing bombastic war against the Planned Parenthood Federation of America has intensified beyond belief this summer to the point where the full faith and credit of the United States rises as a potential casualty.

In the halls of Congress, the battle cry to defund Planned Parenthood – the $1 billion network of 700 clinics that offer free and low-cost reproductive and other health services – has accelerated out of control. Those riding the frenzied bandwagon to demonize the organization now threaten to shut down the U.S. government if the nonprofit agency is not promptly stripped of all taxpayer funding.

That battle plan is as misguided as the campaign of deception, distortion and half-truths fueling it. In the end, hot-headed emotion must give way to thoughtful logic to preserve the critical services Planned Parenthood provides to 5 million people annually.

The latest hurtful volleys aimed at the organization were lobbed last month by the The Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group. Its hidden-camera videos released in recent weeks purport to show that Planned Parenthood illegally sells tissue from aborted fetuses for its perverted profit.

The heavily edited and surreptitiously taken videos show little more than the center’s feeble efforts to galvanize national outrage against the health provider. As the Washington Post pointed out last week, “None of the videos released shows anything illegal and, in fact, the full footage of Planned Parenthood executives meeting with people presumed to be buyers for a human biologics company include repeated assertions that clinics are not selling tissue but only seeking permitted reimbursement costs for expenses.”

Nor do the videos contain essential context such as Planned Parenthood’s fetal-tissue program operates in only three states or that such tissues serve as the basis for progressive and life-lengthening research for such diseases and conditions as HIV, hepatitis, congenital heart defects, retinal degeneration and Parkinson’s.

THE TRUTH ABOUT PLANNED PARENTHOOD

As truth stands as the greatest defense against smear campaigns, those thinking about jumping on board the defund PP juggernaut ought to consider these facts about the organization and its services:

Only 3 percent of all Planned Parenthood services are abortion-related.

Each year, the organization provides 500,000 breast exams, 400,000 Pap tests, 4.5 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases and 500,000 interventions to prevent pregnancies.

Planned Parenthood receives only one-third of its funding from public sources and has 8 million activists, supporters and donors working for women’s health and safety, including those supporting its clinics in Youngstown and Cortland.

Given these facts, those who seek to demonize the group should brace themselves for a fight. Although a vote to defund the organization failed last week in Congress, some lawmakers are pressing ahead with their call for defunding the group as a prerequisite for final budget action this fall. They’re also gearing up a congressional investigation into the organization.

We support such an investigation on both narrow and broad grounds. Narrowly, the hearings can shed light on the questions surrounding the videos, specifically their full and undoctored context. More broadly, they can illuminate the many positive contributions the group founded by social reformer Margaret Sanger in 1921 continue to make toward a healthy America.

The hearings must play out, however, in a bipartisan arena grounded in fact and logic, not in emotion and hyperbole. When they end, we would hope for a truce to end any threat of a government shutdown and to quash unwarranted intimidation of this nation’s essential family-health institution.