(Photo: AP/Charlie Neibergall)
In the Republican war on Planned Parenthood, there are many casualties, most notably, poor women and the truth. But the real target is the Democratic Party and its frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination.
It should not surprise us that in a campaign in which the Democrats are expected to select Hillary Clinton as their nominee, government funding of Planned Parenthood's health-care services is again a big issue. In the right-wing mind, there is no woman more uppity than a liberal woman who would deign to run for president. The second-most uppity woman is the one in somebody else's family (or your own) who claims control of her own fertility. When the first is emblematic of the second, a season of hate against both is a no-brainer.
Poor women rely on the Planned Parenthood clinics for the most fundamental health care a woman of childbearing age needs: basic heart-rate and blood-pressure readings, treatment of infections, cancer screenings, contraception. So do many college students, as well as people who are more broke than poor. When I was in college, and later when I was working as a freelancer, my visits to Planned Parenthood clinics constituted the only health care I received, period. It was all I could afford. (Thank Goddess for that sliding scale that ties the level of the fee paid by patients to their income.) Planned Parenthood also provides abortions, procedures protected by law, to pregnant people who do not wish to carry a fetus to term.
But those who visit Planned Parenthood for their health-care needs are not people that Republicans care about. They are often people of color; they are low-income; many are single women. While the warriors against Planned Parenthood frame their fight as one against abortion, the war is more roundly against health care for the kind of women who are least likely to vote for Republicans, all to stoke a GOP base formed of a particular subset of white men (and the women who love them)-a subset comprising those who are aggrieved at their perceived loss of power to women and people of darker hues.
That's what the war against Planned Parenthood really is: a reality show all about showing uppity women who's boss.
The release of videos by well-financed, right-wing provocateurs show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the harvesting of post-abortive fetal tissue in a cavalier sort of a way, feeding the filmmakers' false claim that Planned Parenthood's incentive in providing fetal tissue to researchers is financial. Who needs the truth when the lie is so much more satisfying to those whose rage one hopes to stoke?
The timing of the videos' release is strategic: The war on Planned Parenthood is now an issue in the presidential campaign.
Among Republicans, a candidate's pledge to "defund Planned Parenthood" is to 2016 what Grover Norquist's extortive anti-tax pledge was to presidential campaigns of the recent past.
Those who target Planned Parenthood, ostensibly for its abortion clinics, know that at least as many people who rely on the organization for basic health care, not just abortion, will suffer the consequences of a world without its health-care centers. And the experience of Texas, which outlawed the use of state health-care spending on services provided by Planned Parenthood, shows that there are few local community health clinics that can pick up the slack. The most fiscally responsible use of government health-care funding matters not to Republicans; this is a culture war. Medicaid and Medicare dollars spent at a Planned Parenthood clinic are clearly dollars well spent, because they save the government untold amounts in emergency-room visits and care for patients with advanced diseases.
But it's been a long time since the Republican Party, for all of its austerity rhetoric, cared a whit about fiscal responsibility. That's just a name it slaps on the act of drowning government in the bathtub, to paraphrase Mr. Norquist.
While the net effect of the war on Planned Parenthood is the oppression of women in their most personal realms, the war being fought is really one for the preservation of a much grander challenge to the psyche of those aggrieved, angry, and frightened fellows in the Republican grassroots. For while the war affects the agency of individual women, especially as pertains to access to contraception, with its rhetorical focus on abortion, the war is also about a truly profound question-not that of when "life begins," rather that of just who gets to decide when a fetus is person, and when it's not.
The sonogram a couple tacks up on a refrigerator is only a picture of their future child because the woman has decided to bring that fetus to term. The emotional connection is real-because of the woman's intention.
When the woman does not intend to bring the fetus to term, a fetal sonogram is clearly not a picture of future person. Ultimately, abortion leaves to a woman, in the event of her pregnancy, the determination of what is and isn't human life.
And for that presumption of power, she and all she represents must be punished-along with any candidate who just might resemble her too closely.
