A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"Abortions for some. Miniature American flags for others."

Peter Durkin, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Houston and SE Texas wrote an editorial that appeared in yesterday's Houston Chronicle commemorating the 20th anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut:

Forty years ago, on June 7, 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut recognized an individual's right to privacy in family planning matters and provided the first constitutional protection for legal access to birth control. In its ruling, the court struck down a Connecticut law that made the use of birth control by married couples illegal. The court's decision came five years after oral contraceptives became available to American women and nearly 50 years after Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States.

This historic decision paved the way for the nearly unanimous acceptance of contraception that now exists in this country. The Griswold decision has resulted in profound and beneficial social and health changes, in large part because of women's relatively new freedom to control their fertility. Maternal and infant health has improved dramatically, the infant death rate has plummeted, the unintended pregnancy rate has also declined and women have been able to fulfill increasingly diverse educational, social, political and professional aspirations.

That "nearly unanimous acceptance of contraception" Durkin describes is less and less widespread every day, unfortunately. In Texas, some high school textbooks don't even include state-mandated contraceptive information, choosing instead to instruct students to "get rest" in order to avoid STDs.

Despite the societal advances made since granting access to birth control, 40 years later we find ourselves still fighting to protect the fundamental right to decide when and if to bear children. We hear of pharmacists who refuse to fill doctors' prescriptions for birth control and emergency contraception, health insurance companies that don't cover birth control but do cover drugs such as Viagra, and state legislatures, including our own, that misguidedly focus on the more politically and morally charged debates over abortion rather than striving for common ground on preventing unintended pregnancies.

That last part is really the crux of it. No one wants more abortions. But those that do occur should be conducted in a safe environment, and everyone should have correct information about birth control.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment, however:

Yes, well, the one SURE way to prevent an unintended pregnancy is by abstaining from sex, but Planned Parenthood is against abstinence being taught in schools. And some of us don't consider killing babies on-demand, to be a societal advance.

For starters, Planned Parenthood isn't against the teaching of abstinence, but rather against it being the only option in sex education. Because we all know how effective that is.

The "killing babies on-demand" line makes for tasty propaganda, however. The image of women lined up in front of the clinic, impatiently looking at their watches while they wait to enter the abattoir is conveniently appalling, and - of course - ignores the emotional anguish most PP clients go through in making their decision. And that's before they have to maneuver their way through dozens of mouth-breathing scumbags thrusting doctored pictures of fetuses in their faces.

Durkin is the same compassionate person who celebrated the fact that abortion procedures have risen dramatically over the past twenty years:

Abortion procedures: 2,882 vs. 6,876. This growth in clients is thanks to our Fannin and Bryan staff, our medical director and other staff physicians.

That is so offensive.

Offensive? Hardly. Clumsily worded? Perhaps. Let me give it a try:

This growth in clients is thanks to our Fannin and Bryan staff. Specifically, our workers who provide such helpful assistance to our clients and our volunteers who assist them in entering our facilities (in spite of verbal abuse and harassment of not just themselves, but also their families and friends). Our medical director and other staff phsyicians, who continue to provide services to low-income women even while their associates are murdered and they and their families are threatened by cowards hiding behind anonymity and cloaked in self-righteous fundamentalism.

Besides that, they missed another key number in the newsletter:

Total client visits: 55,885 vs. 104,000 today. this remarkable growth is thanks to our hard-working clinic directors, clinicians, and medical services staff.

Wow, look at that. Almost 100,000 people visited a Planned Parenthood clinic for things like birth control, pre-natal care, and gynecological examinations. Funny how that never seems to come up, but then, I suppose it doesn't jibe with the anti-choice crowd's image of Planned Parenthood as a collective of slavering butchers dragging teenage girls out of cheerleading practice to have their wombs involuntarily scraped.