attribution: Planned Parenthood annual report 2011-2012
What Planned Parenthood does.
The proximate cause of
this anti-abortion site's outrage is an online Planned Parenthood ad with the text, "Your baby will thank you." What it shows, however, is that the right has demonized Planned Parenthood to the point of fever. The hatred of the group is based on the certain knowledge that Planned Parenthood does absolutely nothing but abortions, and late-term abortions at that, and late-term abortions in particular. That the group is focused primarily on women's health care—things like STD testing, cancer screenings and yes, scary-scary
contraception—is not allowed to enter their minds. These are the people who honestly believe the faux-stories about "abortionplexes."
The thought process must go something like this:
Truth: Babies suffer during abortions./Babies are ripped apart during abortions./Babies are deprived of life during abortions.
Planned Parenthood: Babies enjoy suffering./Babies enjoy getting ripped apart./Babies enjoy being deprived of life. (Just like we all would, right?!)
Loons. Absolute loons. There's a reason convicted clinic bombers can still hold high-profile jobs in anti-abortion organizations, and why people who shoot doctors on the doorsteps of their churches can
generate fawning interviews with anti-choice activists wondering if the replacement doctors need to be shot as well. You take one little step and you've gone from there into the realms of the
Rick Perrys and
Jan Brewers and that particular scab on Texas' ass,
Rep. Steve Stockman, looking to defund the group
by name, even if its absence in their states will harm the women of their states directly. It's a religious war, and in a religious war you're allowed to bomb things, you're allowed to kill people, and you're allowed to inflict as many unnecessary casualties as possible to get your point across. You're
certainly allowed to write laws that punish specific groups for not adhering to your own religious beliefs, too. We don't call them the American Taliban for nothing.
Planned Parenthood is forever talking about how it provides birth control. Right. A baby who was never born because her mother was on birth control is definitely going to thank Mom for that.
In some insane jump of non-logic, Planned Parenthood is attempting to convince women that their babies will “thank them” for visiting their local clinic. This is no better than Nazis posting signs of happy Jews, thanking the SS officers for the death camps – and the gas chambers in particular.
Absolute. Loons.
Your baby will thank you when you don't transmit an easily treated STD to them because you had it treated at one of the few local clinics that existed and that you could afford. Your baby will thank you when you don't die from breast cancer that could have been caught early enough to save your life. Your baby will thank you when you don't die in a hospital bed on their first birthday because some goddamn crank has decided that the dead, decaying corpse of a ex-fetus has to stay inside you no matter what because God wills it. This isn't hard, unless your religious opinions are so extreme that you warp all of reality around your own addled noggin.
Again, though, and this is hardly a new phenomenon: the far-right position is based on a fever dream. Reality is not allowed to intrude on the happy conspiracy theories that make the practitioners feel oppressed, or feel righteous, or feel like freedom fighters in service of a cause that nobody else can even parse out. That was always the case, but now Republican governors, senators, congressmen and other party leaders have embraced the fever dreams as governing strategy, and are holding hearings based on the fever dreams, and are passing laws based entirely on the premises of the fever dreams. Government by conspiracy theory.