Pema Levy says that while conservatives in Congress ostensibly aim at stopping abortion, they’re going to end up cutting needed health services for poor women.
Earlier this month, the anti-abortion movement took a play out of James O’Keefe’s playbook; allegedly, men began showing up at about a dozen Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, claiming to be part of a sex-trafficking operation that involved minors and illegal immigrants. At least one of the men has been tied to the anti-abortion group Live Action, which has long-standing ties to O’Keefe. After five days of this, the nonprofit alerted Attorney General Eric Holder to the possibility of a sex-trafficking operation but, more likely, a smear campaign against them.
The point is to generate a scandal and turn public sentiment against Planned Parenthood in the same way that O’Keefe and his allies, fueled by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, brought down the community housing group ACORN in 2009. (In fact, O’Keefe himself had gone after Planned Parenthood before.) But it is just the latest in a series of attacks by anti-abortion advocates who hope to bring down Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading reproductive health-care provider. The organization is a prime target in the fight against reproductive choice. Harassment outside abortion facilities, particularly at larger clinics, increased over the last year.
