You want to have government shutdown fight over Planned Parenthood, Republicans? Bring. It.
"We are doing anything we can to expose these extremists so they have less power and can't hide and sneak around so easily," said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood. "We're working to change the culture of shame and abuse and harassment of women who are seeking reproductive health care, abortion or otherwise."
The strategy won't be enough to stop Senate Republicans from voting to defund Planned Parenthood, which they are set to do next week. Likewise, it won't upend congressional hearings that are likely to happen after the August recess. But Planned Parenthood has already reaped one benefit of the controversy: According to Laguens, fundraising has spiked in the wake of attacks on the group.
"The benefit of having been a women's health care provider for 99 years, and to being somebody who's been there in the lives of one in five American women, is that when people come after Planned Parenthood, people tend to not like that, and it actually has the opposite effect," Laguens said. "More people send money, more people ask what they can do to help, more people come to us for health care."
Planned Parenthood has been through this game before. Like this exact game in
2011. It didn't work then, and it's not going to work now. A government shutdown over Planned Parenthood would backfire on the Republicans so many ways it would make their pinheads spin. The most satisfying way, however, would be a massive increase in financial support for the organization, and that many more poor and middle-income women getting access to health care because of it.