Poor Figures and Extraordinary Geniuses

Most of you, I’m sure, will recall my efforts last spring to post here about my pro-life views, despite the fact that it terrifies me.  In the wake of what’s happened the past several days in the U.S. and the uproar it’s causing among my Facebook friends and elsewhere, I feel the need to post on this topic again.  It may show up in a couple places, in fact.  This will be a very long post, but please bear with me and be kind if you disagree.

The furor at the moment is over the Susan G. Komen foundation’s withdrawal of funding from Planned Parenthood in the wake of investigations into the latter organization.  In the past, I have been very hard-pressed not to support Komen, because they work with so many different companies sponsoring pink ribbon this and that; however, I’ve done my best to avoid donating to them inadvertently, because I did not want my dollars going through them to Planned Parenthood and through Planned Parenthood to abortion or other practices with which I disagree.  The split allows me to be much freer with my purchases and direct donations, but that, of course, is not the most important part.

Many are angry at Komen because of Planned Parenthood’s claims that millions of women will, as a result, lose access to basic cancer screenings like mammograms.  Is my understanding that very few Planned Parenthood clinics provide mammograms themselves.  See video/audio evidence here.  They do not own the medical equipment to do so.  Some, I believe, have specially-appointed mammogram days where women can come be screened, presumably with borrowed equipment.  But the majority only refer women to other clinics and hospitals that do not fall under the umbrella of Planned Parenthood.  They do not even follow up with these women to see if they’ve had the mammogram performed.  Thus, the money that Komen has denied to PP could be re-donated to other clinics and hospitals that actually do provide mammograms, bypassing the middleman and inflicting no significant loss of business on Planned Parenthood.  They can still refer, and other clinics can provide at a reduced cost or for free with Komen’s help.  Donating to the central organization of Planned Parenthood may have been easier for the Komen foundation, but donating to individual clinics outside that bureaucratic mess is likely to be more efficient.  Though purportedly not for profit, PP is in all other respects a massive business with many cogs, and big businesses always have an element of waste.  The amount of money that Komen granted to PP was negligible anyhow compared to PP’s overall budget:  about $600,000 from Komen versus about a billion dollars from other sources, including the state and federal governments (aka the taxpayer).  Planned Parenthood is not actually pressed for funds because of this loss, and there is no reason for any hiatus in cancer-detecting services, as the founder and CEO of Komen explains here.

So then, I have to ask myself, why would Planned Parenthood deliberately mislead the public by saying that women’s access to mammograms is threatened?  Well, I think the main answer is that funding is a political game, and Planned Parenthood seems to be operating on a mercantilist ideology:  all funding, all legislation, all reproductive information must somehow be routed through PP before being distributed to the rest of the world.  To bypass them—for instance, for Komen to give directly to clinics that provide mammograms—is akin to smuggling.  Any loss for Planned Parenthood, in their minds, must be a gain for opponents of abortion, and every gain for opponents of abortion must rob Planned Parenthood of wealth and success.  I suspect this is their view for a number of reasons, including PP’s consistent and vehement opposition to any and all parental consent requirements, ultrasound requirements, or even medical regulation requirements that have been proposed at any level of government.  Now, historically, there have been some problems with this “zero-sum game” theory.  First of all, its basic premise is false in that a gain for one group or another does not constitute an automatic loss for its competitors.  Secondly, it’s this sort of controlling attitude that brought about little disturbances that we all know and love, like the American Revolution. 

This, of course, is just an analogy, and I’m not certain what PP’s economic theories actually are, but I think there is no doubt that PP sees itself as the business empire of “reproductive services.”  PP is a business and often behaves like a business, not like a charity.  One major concern of a business is simply to keep its customers coming, to establish customer loyalty.  Evidently, PP has succeeded tremendously well at this, as a new group has popped up on Facebook in the wake of the Komen kerfuffle:  De-Fund Komen.  Now, this just boggles my mind.  These are the same people who blame Komen for eliminating its funding to PP because they claim the move will lead to undetected cancers.  In retaliation, they are proposing (even if ironically) the destruction of the most visible and active organization for breast cancer awareness and research in the country.  All because Komen decided that its money would be better used elsewhere than given to an organization whose primary mission has never been the prevention of cancer.  That really says something about where these folks’ priorities lie, I think.  How many more cases of undetected breast cancer would result from defunding Komen?  Certainly far more than will result from Komen’s withdrawal of support from PP.  Yet PP has their blind loyalty in a way that Komen does not, and I am not sure why.

There is good reason to believe that some of the services PP offers to women actually increase the risk of breast cancer, so it’s somewhat counterintuitive that Komen would have donated to them in the first place.  It amounts to funding the problem you’re seeking to resolve.  Birth control pills, for instance, are a known carcinogen because of the high levels of the hormone estrogen they contain.  Also, women who delay their first full-term pregnancy are at a higher risk of developing cancer than women who bear their first children in their early 20s.  Why is that so?  It’s because child-bearing modifies immature, more cancer-prone breast tissue into mature, cancer-resistant cells.  Women whose breast tissue is immature for longer periods of time leave a larger window for cells to go haywire.  That much is simply a biological fact.  Yet PP’s raison d’être is to allow women to delay pregnancies for as long as they like, often by ingesting carcinogenic pills, at a time when their breast tissue is most vulnerable to cancer.

There has been much debate, stretching back as far as the late 1950s, about the impact of abortion on cancer rates.  Abortion supporters tend to carry out and reference studies that demonstrate no link, while abortion opponents tend to carry out and reference studies that prove a link.  Behind all the yelling at one another, however, is a very simple scientific concept not unlike the concept I presented above.  Changes in hormone levels and breast tissue in a healthy pregnancy begin as soon as a woman conceives, and they continue throughout her pregnancy.  However, it is only in the last month or so of pregnancy that the breast tissue reaches full development and becomes cancer-resistant.  It is my understanding that if a woman miscarries naturally, her body knows it and naturally shuts down this process.  Miscarriage is sometimes the result of the body never having created the correct levels of hormones in the first place, so there has been little change in breast tissue.  However, if a healthy pregnancy is unexpectedly interrupted—through an accident that causes miscarriage, through an abortion, or even through premature delivery—the development of breast tissue stalls before reaching the final, cancer-resistant stage.  Breast tissue, which has been multiplying rapidly in preparation for nursing a child, is suddenly left in a dangerous limbo.  Estrogen levels have not been permitted to decrease slowly.  Now, while a connection between abortion and breast cancer is certainly subject to debate, I think the science of it makes sense.  It seems to me that it is unwise—if not dishonest—to insist that there is absolutely no possibility of an increased risk of breast cancer after abortion.  And yet, this is precisely what Planned Parenthood insists, if it bothers to mention cancer at all.  It has to insist, because it is a business that must keep its customers loyal.

The Susan G. Komen foundation has given its reason for severing ties with Planned Parenthood as this:  that it cannot support an organization that is undergoing investigation.  I believe the particular investigation in question is one happening in Florida, and it’s related to Medicaid fraud.  However, there has been a much wider controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood lately.  In a series of undercover investigations, a young woman, Lila Rose visited a number of PP clinics posing as a frightened teenager who feared she was pregnant.  She secretly videotaped her interactions with PP staff, with rather shocking results.  Usually, she would give her age as fifteen, or some other age under the age of consent, and reveal that her boyfriend was in his twenties.  Planned Parenthood staff in these various locations around the US repeatedly gave the same answer:  either she should lie about his age, or lie about hers on official documents.  That way, Planned Parenthood would not have to go through the bother of reporting statutory rape.  PP employees were similarly evasive when Lila Rose presented her background as one of sexual abuse, or when she posed as a victim of a child prostitute ring.  Consistently, Planned Parenthood displayed a complete lack of concern for child welfare and an unwillingness to comply with federal law.  Lila Rose’s videos are all accessible online, and there are far too many instances in far too many states for the investigation to be dismissed as a fluke.  A number of former Planned Parenthood employees, most notably Abby Johnson, have since come forward to confirm that what Lila Rose discovered is, in fact, common.  Planned Parenthood has criticized Lila Rose for her methods, but what she did was in the a long tradition of investigative journalism that goes back to Nellie Bly posing as a madwoman in order to expose the abuses of insane asylums.  The Komen foundation is absolutely justified in deciding, in the wake of these scandals, that an affiliation with Planned Parenthood may taint by association.

I’ve thought long and hard about this point, because I think I can anticipate some of the counter-arguments I might receive.  For example:  but Amy, how can you say that funding Planned Parenthood is wrong because PP hides cases of child abuse, and yet support the Catholic Church after its own sex-abuse debacle?  I’ll try to answer this as well as I can without going off on a complete tangent.  For one thing, there is much more concrete proof in the case of Planned Parenthood.  These are employees on videotape aiding and abetting what they thought was real child prostitution, real statutory rape.  By contrast, many of the claims against Catholic priests have been impossible to prove, brought years after the fact, with no evidence except for one man’s word against another’s.  The world (and I) may believe whatever it likes with regard to the guilt of certain Catholic priests, but the justice system requires that they be proven guilty in order to be legally punished.  As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need for further evidence to prove the guilt of Planned Parenthood in these cases.  Also, there is no doubt in my mind that the Catholic Church around the world does far more good than evil by providing real, tangible care to humanity’s most impoverished, most ostracized, most physically and emotionally starved people.  But all justifications aside, the bottom line is that abuse should not be tolerated anywhere, and if anyone who believes that I should cease to support the Catholic Church because of an improvable scandal there, surely cannot argue that it is morally right to support Planned Parenthood after seeing incontrovertible proof of the scandal within its system.

But it does so much good! is the likely response.  Surely the good outweighs the bad!  Does it?  Here’s the best analogy I can devise:  say you are the leader of a country, and another country asks you for financial assistance.  The other country needs the money because it is trying to expand its health care system to reach into the poorest corners of its territory.  However, at the same time, the country is implementing an ongoing and blatant policy of ethnic cleansing of a minority population in those same impoverished regions.  Can you justify funding this nation?  You can equivocate all you like about history or morality being full of gray areas, or things being for the greater good, but when it comes right down to it, there’s no middle ground here.  You can’t “partially” fund this country—either you give it money, or you don’t.  Either you help it pursue both its goals, or you help it pursue neither.  Either you decide that you can overlook mass murder, or you decide that you can't.

That’s what it is to fund Planned Parenthood, and perhaps that’s what the Susan G. Komen foundation has finally realized.  Abortion is the systematic elimination of a vulnerable, minority segment of the human population that has been deemed somehow less than human.  Though abortions make up a small percentage of PP’s overall “services” (a low estimate is 3%), Planned Parenthood performs around 30% of all the abortions that take place in the U.S. every year.  That puts the number of abortions done in PP clinics at over 332,000 annually and makes it the leading abortion provider.  Abortion accounts for 98% of the “services” Planned Parenthood offers to pregnant women.  The number of women receiving prenatal care or adoption services from Planned Parenthood has been in steady decline in recent years:  340 abortions are now performed per every one adoption referral.  Even as federal funding for PP has increased—funding that PP claimed would help reduce the need for abortions—the number of abortions they conduct has gone up every year.  And this is while the yearly rate of abortions in America has, overall, declined slightly.  So, while fewer women are getting abortions, more of them are going to Planned Parenthood for the procedure.  I would go so far as to say that PP is developing a monopoly on the abortion industry.  Abby Johnson, former Planned Parenthood employee of the month, has remarked that the PP clinic where she worked was repeatedly encouraged to perform more abortions because abortions brought in more money than non-abortion services—and even not-for-profits runs on money.  Abortion income is a major source of revenue for PP:  estimated at just under 40% of its income, in fact, given that the average cost of an abortion is about $468.

There is another reason for my analogy, however.  It’s not just that Planned Parenthood has made itself the go-to place for abortions; it’s also that it markets its services to very specific segments of the American population.  True, women of all races and classes go to PP for all sorts of reasons, the women who most frequently avail themselves of Planned Parenthood’s offerings are impoverished minorities.  PP purposefully locates its clinics in areas that are more easily accessible to poor women.  I don’t for a moment believe that the current leaders of Planned Parenthood have a consciously racist agenda, but the founder of their organization certainly did.  Margaret Sanger, who began Planned Parenthood over ninety years ago, was a member of the eugenicist movement like many of her contemporaries.  She, however, acted on her beliefs, and the letters she left reveal that one of PP’s main objectives was to reduce the number of “undesirable” babies born in the U.S.  A valued speaker at meetings of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, she spouted little gems of wisdom like the following:  “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”  Also, “Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying…demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism…We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

I am not one to hold current members of Planned Parenthood accountable for the sins of its founder, but the fact remains that Planned Parenthood’s patrons are disproportionately poor and non-white compared to the general population.  The intent may be to help these women control their fertility so that they can better their economic situations, but the side effect of it is that poor, non-white women procure abortions at a startling rate.  These estimates are a little rough because I’m using data from about a three year range, but they should still be fairly accurate:  though the black population is 12.6% of the U.S. population by the latest census, black women account for 30% of Planned Parenthood’s yearly abortions.  Though Hispanics amount to 16.3% of the overall population, Hispanic women make up 25% of PP’s abortions.  On the other hand, whites make up 76.2% of the U.S. population, but white women are only 36% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion patients.  Three fourths of women who go to PP for abortions say that they cannot afford another child.  But that a child is unplanned, that a child poses obstacles, does not necessarily mean that the child is unwanted.  And it is tragic that women who, given the appropriate financial and emotional support, would be willing and able to raise another child, turn instead to Planned Parenthood to extinguish that budding life. 

Meanwhile, supporters of Planned Parenthood have done a thorough job smearing crisis pregnancy centers that provide free clothing, diapers, formula, toiletry items, counseling, adoption referrals, and other assistance for low-income women that will allow them not only to carry their pregnancies to term, but to succeed at providing for their new babies.  Whereas Planned Parenthood asks poor women to pay to have their children aborted rather than face a life of poverty, crisis pregnancy centers directly address the issues of poverty that so often cause women to feel trapped into abortion.  Yet, they have been criticized by PP as providing inaccurate medical information (often because they mention the possibility of a cancer risk with abortion), as pressuring and frightening women into keeping their children, and as acting as mere tools of the Catholic Church seeking to impose its backward will.  Having worked at a crisis pregnancy center myself, I can say several things:  firstly, that in my experience, those accusations are entirely untrue; and secondly, that even if crisis pregnancy centers are not staffed by doctors and nurses, they are full of some of the kindest, most compassionate, most selfless women volunteers I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.  Many are Catholic, but many are not.  Many are mothers, and some were in crisis pregnancies themselves.  They offer love, not judgment.  They know what women in crisis need, and they provide it in ways that Planned Parenthood never can, and simply doesn’t want to.

(For Planned Parenthood's low opinion of pro-life protesters, abstinence advocates, and pro-life politicians, please pay close attention to their rather ridiculous animated commercial, Superhero for Choice.)

I could not be prouder of the Susan G. Komen foundation for eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood, and I hope other sponsors will follow suit.  Planned Parenthood is an institution steeped in controversy and, both literally and figuratively, in blood.  It performs no service to human welfare that could possibly outweigh the harm it has inflicted on a too credulous society.