Congress has predictably failed to gain the votes necessary to debate the Bill which will defund Planned Parenthood. We are told not to worry and that the debate should happen someday, and hopefully soon. But it may not happen if we allow the issue to become normalized. In other words, we cannot allow ourselves to become frustrated, numb or bitter, over the fact that Planned Parenthood continues to receive about $1.5 million per day, each day of the year, from the federal government or to be more precise, from each U.S. taxpayer. If we are not diligent, we can become as numb as the abortion workers who are actually sorting through the carnage of each abortion and who can talk about the dead children as though they are talking about a trip to the grocery store. The abortion workers can actually look at a dead human being and exclaim that it is “another boy” or say, “oh, twins”. 

How do we keep this from simply returning to the fabric of our society and instead keep it at the forefront of every member of Congress? We need to keep the facts straight. You see, Planned Parenthood uses a good portion of their $500,000,000.00 annual federal funding, to pay for the best marketing strategies money can buy, to pay for the best lobbyists in Washington, D.C. and in each State Capital, and to wine and dine weak and worthless politicians who vote according to their ability to retain their elected position, regardless of the beliefs, desires and interests of their constituents.

So, it is up to us, the regular Americans, to counter the Planned Parenthood political and media machine, with the facts. This is no small order given the fact that in addition to all the money Planned Parenthood spends on promoting their misinformation, the mainstream media appears to love abortion and gives them free support, publicity and assistance at every step. When Andrea Mitchell interviews Cecile Richards as though she is on the Planned Parenthood payroll, we have a problem. 

As is my usual blogging style, I have selected an article that was tweeted or posted by my adversary. I will analyze each statement by the author of the article (Franchesca Ramsey) as I walk you through it. My comments will remain in bold. It is my hope that you can read this and see how the Planned Parenthood marketing runs into truth and self-destructs. The article comes from a website called Upworthy. I don’t know much about Upworthy, but if the other articles on the site are anything like this one, it should actually be called Unworthy. The headline reads:

5 Planned Parenthood services that aren’t the least bit controversial

For some people, when they hear the name Planned Parenthood, the first thing that comes to mind is abortion.

This is reasonable, since Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the U.S. and they provide few essential health services compared to the quantity of abortions they perform.

But that’s not all Planned Parenthood does.

Keep in mind that they would not exist if it were not for the abortions they perform. They only provide “other services” in order to attract more customers and to appear as though they are a legitimate healthcare provider. And the “other services” Planned Parenthood claims to provide are a very small portion of their existence. Saying Planned Parenthood does more than just provide abortions is like saying Warren Buffett does more than just manage and invest money or Jane Fonda did more than star in movies. Nobody would know who Warren Buffet is if it were not for his ability to make lots of money and they wouldn’t know Jane Fonda if she wasn’t super star Henry Fonda’s daughter, which gave her a career in the film industry.

As an example, look at the Planned Parenthood clinics that have closed over the past couple of years. Many have closed. They didn’t close because people stopped seeking their services and they didn’t close because they decided to become more centralized or efficient. They closed because the state legislatures in various states increased safety standards for abortion clinics, requiring them to meet standards required of other facilities that perform surgery. Instead of making their facility safer or more up to date, they simply closed. The laws did not impact breast exams, pap tests and STD testing, they only impacted abortions. This is proof that Planned Parenthood is primarily (overwhelmingly) an abortion provider. When they are required to make abortion safer, they don’t make them safer and they don’t stop doing them and continue on with all the other “services” they claim to be providing. They just close their doors because their other “services” cannot support the clinic without performing abortions.

Every few years or so, in their fight against reproductive rights, activists refocus on Planned Parenthood as enemy #1.

This is highly inaccurate. There is no “refocus” every few years. Planned Parenthood is at the forefront of everything the Pro-Life movement does. While there are abortionists who are just as revolting as Planned Parenthood, these other abortionists don’t handle the volume that the Planned Parenthood network handles. Also, abortionists like Kermit Gosnell (actually, he’s out of business since he’s in prison now), Leroy Carhart and Pierre Jean-Jacques Renelique are not known to receive enormous amounts of taxpayer funding as does Planned Parenthood. Therefore, most abortion providers (other than Planned Parenthood) cannot spend large amounts of money on marketing, publicity, campaign finance and lobbying elected officials. The leaders of the Pro-Life movement recognize that Planned Parenthood is the abortion giant and if Planned Parenthood can be defunded, there will be more attention on the smaller providers. Therefore, the focus on Planned Parenthood is constant.

People who are against abortion hold it up as the representation of all that is wrong with America: “An entire medical practice set up to give women abortions! They must be stopped!”

Actually, there is an enormous amount of things wrong with America right now, but it is truly is hard to conceive of anything more wrong than killing innocent and defenseless children, then harvesting their organs and selling them. The fact that the employees of Planned Parenthood, the Obama White House, the mainstream media, over 1/2 of Congress and numerous individuals across the country see no problem with this, is indicative of pure evil. It is logical to expect that helping people to recognize this as evil, will help our entire country in many ways. For one, it will help people respect the dignity of each human being. That seems like a great step in the right direction.

But what most of them don’t admit is this really important fact:
Only a measly 3% of their Planned Parenthood services are actually abortion-related.
Do they know that? Did you know that? Well, in an effort to combat the “big bad abortion wolf” narrative, here are five facts you should know about what Planned Parenthood really does:

First, please know that the word “fact” has no definition when it comes from an abortion advocate. While abortion advocates like Franchesca Ramsey are probably capable of telling the truth in many circumstances, they see no need to deal with truth when it comes to abortion. This is because abortion advocates see things like challenge, sacrifice and anything less than pure pleasure, as reprehensible. They also believe that the ends justify the means. They perceive children to be nothing more than noisy, smelly and needy, obstacles to a life of total self-absorption and recoil in fear at the thought of a child in their life. If the means to a life of pleasure requires killing hundreds of thousands of children every year and then spinning that horror into a cure for diseases and illness, the abortion advocate says, “so be it”. Many Planned Parenthood supporters are currently saying the abortion is a win-win situation. It removes an unwanted child and the child’s organs may help cure Parkinson’s disease someday. If you have never seen the movie Soylent Green, this may be a good time to familiarize yourself with the plot. But for purposes of this blog, remember that Planned Parenthood advocates have no idea what a “fact” is. All they care about is promoting their cause. If information helps them, it is a “fact”. If they run across information that does not help them, they ignore it or simply label it “heavily edited”.

1. In 2013, Planned Parenthood performed half a million breast exams.

These are breast exams all women can perform at home, alone, for free. But if you are a woman, and you go to Planned Parenthood, they apparently sometimes offer the exam as a service and then charge you for it. I suppose the overhead cost to Planned Parenthood is the cost of the latex gloves and the cost of the pencil lead used to check the box of the service they provided so that they can qualify for $500,000,000.00 of our tax money again next year. Not a bad gig. I’m surprised they only do 500,000 of these per year. The Planned Parenthood websites state that it is simply part of a routine gynecological exam, but given the political benefit they see in this type of service, they might ramp those numbers up in the future. The takeaway from this “fact” provided by Ms. Ramsey is: A marketing firm came up with this one and it is really lame.

Breast exams are crucial for early cancer detection.

Yes. And they are crucial for trying to make you look like you provide essential health services when the general public realizes that you actually crush certain parts of babies in order to harvest their organs and sell them.

Not only does Planned Parenthood offer affordable exams, they make sure patients know how to do self-exams between screenings.

I’m not sure “affordable” is a good word here. I’d opt for “incredibly profitable”. Since they are part of a standard gynecological exam, they apparently are not billed separately. But they seem to benefit Planned Parenthood as they appear to use these to justify about $1.5 million in taxpayer funding every single day of the year. This for an exam the woman can do at home, on her own, for free.

2. In 2013, Planned Parenthood performed 400,000 pap tests.

Unlike breast exams, Planned Parenthood charges for the pap tests. Therefore, they not only cover their costs for this procedure (we assume), they use the service to justify $500,000,000.00, of taxpayer funding each year. That makes the pap smear an even better money maker than the breast exam. When you are Planned Parenthood and your Senior Director of Medical Research gets caught on video, sipping wine and munching on salad while casually discussing illegal abortion practices, pap tests become a great diversion for your talking points.

While the pap smear won’t tell you if you have cervical cancer, it can detect pre-cancerous cells. Basically, if there’s anything sketchy going on in your cervix, the pap smear tells your doctor so you can figure out the best way to handle it. For people who don’t have insurance or need more affordable health care options, Planned Parenthood is their first stop for preventive and reproductive health care like pap smears.

What Ms. Ramsey does not tell you is that pap tests are available at community health clinics from coast to coast. You do not need Planned Parenthood to receive this service. Additionally, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act has promised coverage for this service, which means you can get it from nearly any medical provider that offers the service. 

Ms. Ramsey also fails to mention (or realize) that the need for pap tests is essential because sexually transmitted diseases such as Human Paploma Virus (HPV) cause cervical cancer and likely numerous other cancers as well. HPV is contracted through skin to skin contact and there is no known protection from all types of HPV for those who are sexually active, not even condoms. Yet Planned Parenthood continues to encourage sexual exploration among teens and college aged youth, without explaining the dire facts about how that activity is highly likely to cause them to contract one or more types of HPV and increases their susceptibility to cancer significantly. The pap test provides no protection, it simply alerts you to a problem you already have and therefore alerts you to the need for treatment. 

A responsible medical provider would be discouraging experimental sexual activity among youth instead of encouraging parents to allow teen sex sleepovers or publishing articles that suggest that teen promiscuity is not necessarily a bad thing. But Planned Parenthood would be jeopardizing their $500 million taxpayer funding per year if they didn’t promote sexual activity among teens because the teens would not need contraceptives, pap stests, STD tests, STD treatment and abortions if they were not sexually active. 

3. Planned Parenthood helps prevent over half a million pregnancies every year.

If true, this is by far Planned Parenthood’s most compelling argument for their existence. Even though this claim runs into absolutely direct conflict with every other goal Planned Parenthood has, they still roll this one out in an effort to distract us from the fact that they kill well over 300,000 children each year and they sell their hearts, brains, livers, etc…, as well.  

How do they claim to prevent pregnancies? Buy promoting, providing and proliferating artificial birth control. You see, they put very little effort into things like chastity and abstinence because chastity and abstinence are really bad for business. People who remain chaste don’t contract sexually transmitted diseases. They don’t get pregnant. They don’t need artificial birth control. So instead of helping youth remain chaste and helping them foster relationships that are not based on sexual activity, Planned Parenthood promotes the sexual activity and then sells or hands out contraceptives under the slogan of “safer sex”. I think the “safer sex” slogan is relatively new because even Planned Parenthood finally admits that there is no such thing as safe sex unless it is between a man and wife who are open to life. And people who are married and open to life have absolutely nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. They go to real doctors. In order to see what I mean, read on.

If you’re not ready for parenthood but abstinence isn’t your style, safe sex is your best bet.

Oops. It looks like Ms. Ramsey may have slipped back in time there and used a term (safe sex) that has been reworked by the Planned Parenthood marketing team. Nonetheless, you see how abortion advocates roll. “Does abstinence sound fun? No. So instead of dying single and alone, get out there with some contraceptives on board. If you run into something that is unpleasant, like an STD or a pregnancy, come back to us and we will take care of everything. You have nothing to worry about.”

Luckily, Planned Parenthood offers free and affordable birth-control options like the pill, the patch, IUDs, and condoms — in addition to emergency contraception like Plan B. And while some people have incorrectly dubbed Plan B an “abortion pill,” it actually just prevents conception — it doesn’t terminate pregnancy. Think of Plan B as as a soccer goalie who goes in and blocks the sperm from ever getting to the egg. Yay sports analogies!

See? Its all safe and fun. You even have a goalie somewhere in your fallopian tubes, kicking those pesky little sperm away from your egg. I’m surprised there wasn’t a little cartoon along with this line.

What Ms. Ramsey ignores is that in order to get that goalie in place, you have to put chemicals and hormones into your body. In a day and age when things like “all natural” and “organic” are becoming more and more popular, Planned Parenthood wants you to fill your body with a drug that actually makes a perfectly healthy part of you malfunction. Isn’t that strange? We are usually trying to make our bodies healthier when we go to a doctor. But Planned Parenthood claims to be a women’s health provider while actually taking deliberate steps to compromise women’s health. 

Ms. Ramsey also ignores the fact that the pills provide absolutely no protection against the STD’s that help build up Planned Parenthood’s “other services”. Nor does she mention the negative side effects of the pills, such as liver disease, gallbladder disease, stroke, blood clots, high blood pressure, or heart disease. It is also believed that birth control pills can cause cancer, but that is hotly disputed by Planned Parenthood and other abortion and contraception advocates. Ms. Ramsey could have shared the fact that the National Cancer Institute recognizes the increased risk of several forms of cancer for women who have used oral birth control, but she didn’t. 

She could have also mentioned that artificial contraception is not 100% effective. What do you do when your contraception fails and you end up pregnant? You go to Planned Parenthood and they kill the baby you see as a burden. But the burden isn’t lifted, you just end up with a new burden, the aching guilt that comes with abortion. That guilt never leaves, causing a much higher suicide rate among mothers who have had abortions (as well as many other terrible burdens).

4. In 2013, Planned Parenthood provided nearly 4.5 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

It makes sense doesn’t it? The teen who received his or her contraception from Planned Parenthood would naturally return to Planned Parenthood for STD testing once symptoms showed up. It’s not like the teen is going to get the STD testing done at the family doctor’s office: “Well little Jimmy, It sure was nice chatting with your dad out there in the waiting room. I haven’t seen him since bowling league ended last year. And did you tell your sex partner that you now have genital warts?”

When we talk about safe sex, pregnancy prevention is often the main focus, as if that’s the only consequence of doing the deed.

Ms. Ramsey is finally ready to talk turkey here. Let’s read on to see if she makes any effort to provide valuable information about the risks and realities of sex outside of marriage.

But sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are something we all have to consider.

She calls them infections, you may call them diseases, but either way, we do all have to recognize the fact that people who are sexually active (which is not everyone) can, and probably will, end up with an STD / STI.

Condoms are a great way to prevent STIs, but sadly they don’t always get the job done.

A swing and a miss by Ms. Ramsey. Strike one on the STD issue. Condoms provide little or no protection against the most prevalent STD out there, HPV. As mentioned earlier, several types of HPV are known to cause cervical cancer. Condoms also fail about 10% to 20% of the time, so some people calculate that to mean that 1 out of 10 times, you are having unprotected sex. It may be the first and it may be the 10th, but each time you do it, you are taking a risk that a pregnancy will result. That and the fact that you are pretty much guaranteed a STD should be emphasized by abortion advocates, but it isn’t. So what does Ms. Ramsey suggest when the condom doesn’t get the job done? 

That’s why it’s great that Planned Parenthood offers affordable STI testing and treatment options.

What great news! Planned Parenthood is just waiting for you to come back and get that disease all cleared up again. Don’t even worry about it. They will have you all disease-free and ready for action again in no time. But that is simply diagnosis and treatment, not prevention, so this is strike 2 for Ms. Ramsey. 

More people who are aware of their STI status and get treatment means more happy and healthy sexual partners to go around. That’s pretty much a win for everyone.

Absolutely! Whether you think variety is the spice of life or whether it is more of a frequency issue for you, your sexually transmitted disease won’t keep you out of the game any longer than absolutely necessary. And talk about win-win situations. Planned Parenthood gets to charge you for treatment which is probably covered by the taxpayer funded Obamacare so you don’t have to pay much of anything, they get a statistic to use when people point out the obvious fact that they are primarily an abortion provider and you get to go out and get another STD in order to boost their statistics even more. The real bonus comes when you or your partner get pregnant while taking all of Planned Parenthood’s advice. Then you return for the big ticket item, an abortion. 

It is important to remember that contraception only works some of the time and even then it only works when it is used properly. They don’t tell you that very few people use contraception properly and consistently over time. So even if you or your partner decide to rely on contraception, history indicates that there will be occasions when you are having sex and you think you are protected, but you aren’t. 

But the real gem in Ms. Ramsey’s statment above is, “more happy and healthy sexual partners to go around”. In other words, she wants the teens to get out there and get busy or demand for Planned Parenthood’s “services” will drop. Promiscuity and sexual exploration are the sales model for Planned Parenthood. Strike 3 for Ms. Ramsey.

5. Planned Parenthood encourages patients to explore all their options, not just abortion. That includes adoption and parenthood.

Ms. Ramsey may believe this and Planned Parenthood may claim this, but in reality, this isn’t the case. Planned Parenthood guides you toward abortion and consistently resists anything that makes abortion a less likely choice. When Pro-Life advocates have tried to pass laws that require abortion providers to show mothers ultrasound images of their child, the lobbying and resistance of the abortion industry has been intense. If such a law gets passed, the workers in the clinic have intentionally discouraged mothers from looking at the images. In Nebraska, we have tried to pass a law that requires certain signs to be posted in abortion clinics. The signs tell mothers that they can call for help if they are being coerced into having an abortion. The bill can’t even make it out of committee because the senators on the Judiciary committee just don’t see a need for some reason. Maybe their reason is all the pleasant stories they have been told about abortion. Who knows. I’m guessing the bill will get out of committee this year, given the videos we are now seeing. 

Planned Parenthood is also very poor at referring mothers to adoption agencies. I bet that would change if Planned Parenthood received a little kickback for each adoption referral.

While abortion is one way to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for everyone.

Gosh, it seems like an astounding number of mothers have been convinced that it was the right choice for them when they started the thought process by a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic. Over 300,000 per year over the past few years alone. The adoption referalls pale in comparison. I don’t think they even track the number of mom’s who walk out of Planned Parenthood and choose to raise their child. Such mothers can’t stay with Planned Parenthood because Planned Parenthood does not even provide prenatal care and intentional live child-birth services. Moms who want to remain moms have to go to an OBGYN for those things.

Planned Parenthood is about helping teens and adults make smart and healthy choices, not forcing people into doing things they aren’t comfortable with.

Do you believe this? I don’t. And I look at the content on the Planned Parenthood websites and it confirms the fact that Planned Parenthood is all about coaxing young boys and girls into doing things that they are likely not comfortable with. There are articles about homosexual behavior, promiscuity and how far a teen should go on a date. Then we have undercover video footage of Planned Parenthood employees describing “rough” sex (bondage and discipline) to a teenaged girl. The simple fact is that most teenagers are uncomfortable with almost everything, especially sex. Anyone who is glorifying teen sexual activity is promoting something that most teens are uncomfortable with.

When it comes to dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, adoption and parenthood are worth considering too. Whether it’s online or in person, Planned Parenthood helps women who are considering all options, including adoption or parenthood.

This is as exaggerated as the overall claim that Planned Parenthood provides “many services” in addition to abortion. They pay nothing more than lip service to adoption and parenthood. But even if they did promote adoption or parenthood as vigorously as they should, why would that be a reason to support Planned Parenthood? All real medical providers promote parenthood and adoption. What Ms. Ramsey is saying is that Planned Parenthood does not always conclude that killing the child is the best remedy for an inconvenient pregnancy. This is no feather in the cap of a healthcare provider. It is a lot like looking at Ted Bundy and concluding that he was actually a good citizen because he didn’t spend all of his time kidnapping and killing people. He only murdered his victims about 3% of the time. 

There are millions of people who rely on Planned Parenthood for all kinds of important health care services.

No there aren’t. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on them for killing their child. The rest utilize their services but those services are readily available elsewhere. If the service is essential, it is available and we already know that the vast majority of abortions are due to the mother’s concerns about how inconvenient the child will be, and this does not make the abortion an essential service.

If a mother is in rare but serious danger with a condition like an ectopic pregnancy, she can even go to a Catholic doctor or Catholic hospital and receive treatment up to and including the removal of the infected portion of her fallopian tube containing the baby. This will result in the death of the baby, in order to save the mother’s life, but the Catholic Church accepts this as true healthcare that is not contrary to the Church’s teaching on abortion. The intent was not to kill the child, it was to save the mother’s life. If left untreated, both mother and child were probably going to die. In such cases the death of the child is not the direct intent and the child will be provided every dignity possible. As we can see from the Planned Parenthood videos released by David Daeliden, the babies killed in the Planned Parenthood clinics are nothing more than medical waste or products for sale. They just throw them all in one big bag and toss them in the freezer (after their organs have been harvested of course)

Whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, I hope we can all agree to be pro-health.

Oh, so there is a middle ground? I think Ms. Ramsey is getting creative here and her creativity does not match reality. Community clinics, hospitals and private doctor’s offices can and do provide every service Planned Parenthood provides that is not related to abortion. Since abortion is not healthcare, it is just killing, shuttering Planned Parenthood is pro-health. Cecil Richards can find a job elsewhere, I’m sure. Maybe the Margaret Sanger museum needs a curator. Maybe Kermit Gosnell needs a P.R. person.

Right now, anti-abortion activists are pushing to defund Planned Parenthood, which would keep people from accessing health care like cancer screenings, HIV tests, and more.

Wrong again Ms. Ramsey. It would just send them to a new address. And the new address would not have a department that deals with selling dead baby body parts. 

Ms. Ramsey then makes her blatant plea for support of Planned Parenthood: 

If you think it’s important that these kinds of free and low-cost services remain available, let Congress know you support Planned Parenthood by signing the “I Stand With Planned Parenthood” petition.

What the petition should actually say is this: “Just Do Whatever Planned Parenthood Says And Nobody Get’s Hurt (except for women, children and the family members and friends of those women and children as well as the entire society)”