How many Planned Parenthood donations go toward getting women healthcare?
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Very interesting article from The New York Times: “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis.” Mostly, it’s an article about how a lot of Planned Parenthoods around the country don’t have enough funding to offer even competent care much less compassionate care, but it’s a really interesting article not just because it kind of gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on with Planned Parenthood but also because there’s a lot of parallels between the way they talk about Planned Parenthood’s issues with money and other aspects of the abortion debate. I thought of parallels with the way that we sometimes talk about pregnancy resources centers or talk about major pro-life organizations and what they fundraise for and what they do with the money. I thought of parallels with some of the denial of care stories, where they talk about some particularly horrible situation and then try to suggest that this is common.
So for example, The New York Times article says,
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, Planned Parenthood has enjoyed a fundraising boom with $498 million in donations that year. But little of it goes to the state affiliates to provide health care at clinics. Instead, under the national bylaws, the majority of the money is spent on the legal and political fight to maintain abortion rights.
Katie Benner, “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis“
This is interesting because every now and then somebody will publish the publicly available financial data for a pro-life organization, Live Action is a big one, that has a really large budget and then talk about how little of that money is actually going to helping women with unintended and difficult pregnancies, to help them not feel like they need abortion. “Where’s the direct support for women and children? If you cared so much about women and children, why wouldn’t you be spending all or almost all of your money on that?” And Live Action’s mission is kind of similar to this one, where they are trying to change the culture, they’re trying to make a persuasive argument to society about why abortion is a problem, and most of the money they fundraise goes toward that mission more than direct support of pregnant women and their babies, and then you have a parallel here where Planned Parenthood spends most of their money going toward the mission for the cultural political fight for abortion rights instead of toward pregnant women who want to have access to abortion.
I mean, I think the reality is that whichever side of this fight you’re on, you’re going to need people and organizations working on different things. There’s direct support, there’s cultural persuasion, there’s political fights, there’s other stuff, too. You’re going to need people for all of that, so it’s interesting to see, from my perspective, our opposition having the same problems we do, where people are having a lot of internal fights about what should be the priority and if you don’t share their priority, do you really believe in the mission.
Of course the way that the higher-ups at Planned Parenthood handle their money isn’t the only reason that Planned Parenthood affiliates are struggling to have enough funding. They also talk about them having less Medicare reimbursements in states that are defunding Planned Parenthood. There’s arguments to defund Planned Parenthood at the federal level. I didn’t know this, but apparently the Affordable Care Act also kind of hurt Planned Parenthood because it gave low-income women more options and a lot of them stopped going to Planned Parenthood. They talk also about how COVID decreased patient numbers.
Interestingly, the article didn’t mention, that I saw, the proliferation of abortion pills, but I would expect that that also has dramatically decreased the number of patients Planned Parenthood sees. Usually, when we talk about abortion pills being mailed, we’re thinking of someone in like Louisiana ordering pills from New York, but someone in New York can also order pills from New York if they don’t feel like going into a Planned Parenthood.
Whatever the reasons, the lack of funding is one of the main reasons they cite when they talk about these problematic situations that happen at Planned Parenthood: they have botched abortions, they have improperly implanted birth control devices. This one in Nebraska Planned Parenthood I thought was particularly hard to forgive: they didn’t realize the woman was four months pregnant when they gave her an IUD that resulted in her having a stillbirth. Generally, when The New York Times reached out to different Planned Parenthood people for comments on this stuff, they either declined to comment because of privacy concerns for patients or they talked about how these are just anecdotes and if you look at their overall track record, it’s quite good.
And to be frank, I kind of sympathize with that response because I myself have made videos talking about denial of care stories. You’ll hear some story, usually out of Texas, where they’ll talk about a woman having a horrific outcome. They’ll claim it’s because of the abortion bans, we can argue about that or not, and then I’ll point out that Texas has these statistics that show that the overwhelming majority of the time they are treating miscarriage totally appropriately.
How comforting is that to people? Hard to say. Same thing with Planned Parenthood when they say, “Overwhelmingly the care we provide is good,” and then you’re like, “well, that didn’t help this woman who had a stillbirth.” I do think it’s fair to look at horrific anecdotes in a broader context when we’re trying to figure out what’s going on and why and how we can prevent it, and so I think it’s fair for Planned Parenthood to say the same thing.
This part I thought was particularly interesting. They talk about how Planned Parenthoods, in many cases, can’t afford to pay their staff very much. They have really high staff turnover rates and it’s a whole problem with training, morale, and all these things, and they said here, in some cases, salaries are so low that it’s “not unusual for staff members to qualify for Medicaid and federal food assistance.”
I bring this up to talk to my side of the debate, other pro-lifers, because I see some pro-lifers believe that people advocate for abortion because it makes them money or at least people who work at abortion clinics are doing it because it makes them money, and I’m sure that there are specific cases where that is true, especially for the rare few who do very very late abortions, which are much more expensive procedures, it could be the case that they make a really good living off of that, but I think for the vast majority of people who work in abortion clinics it’s not a great money-making endeavor.
So then my side might ask, “okay, well, then why would they work in abortion clinics?” And I’m sure there are variable reasons, it’s going to depend on circumstance, but I think we need to be a lot more aware of the fact that a lot of people on the other side of this issue, pro-choice people, people who support abortion rights, they’re “True Believers.” A lot of them do what they do because they believe that they are protecting and helping women. And, look, we can disagree. We can talk about how we either don’t think this is the best way to help women or even if it does help women, it does so at a far too high of cost, meaning the lives of their prenatal children. But there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, correctly understanding someone’s motivations and framings and premises and then disagreeing with those, versus, on the other hand, assigning them bad faith motivations and then accusing them of being evil or whatever.
I suspect most pro-life people who have bothered to debate this issue at all have, at some point or many many points, experienced the other side accusing us of bad motivations. You know, “we hate sex, we hate women, we hate freedom,” whatever, and that doesn’t persuade us at all. It just convinces us that they have no idea what they’re talking about and they don’t understand our position whatsoever. I know how annoying it is when people accuse me of some horrible motivation that has nothing to do with what I think or how I feel or what I’m saying. I would like it if pro-lifers did not do the same thing to pro-choicers, not just because it might hurt someone’s feelings or make someone angry but because it’s incorrect and it makes us ineffective at communicating well with other people.
Anyway, this part was also interesting. It talked about how Planned Parenthood of Northern California had to end a prenatal care program. California is one of the most pro-choice states, and they still have maternity care deserts and they still have problems with getting people the health care that they need. This is important because you’ll see a narrative, if you haven’t already, that pro-life states, which restrict access to elective abortion, are making access to general health care worse and they have these maternity care deserts and how are these women supposed to get help when you’re closing down Planned Parenthoods, but it’s happening in California, too. Why? It’s important to ask why. Clearly in California Planned Parenthood is not shutting its doors because of abortion bans.
Anyway, it was a really interesting article. There’s lots of other details I didn’t get to. You should read the whole thing.
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