With this weekend marking the fourth release of a creatively edited video designed to make it look like Planned Parenthood sells off foetuses wholesale only to cackle over the proceeds in the breakroom, it’s clear that the stakes have been upped in the war over reproductive justice in the United States. The videos — which may be illegal, and are the subject of an investigation from California Attorney General Kamala Harris — are generating substantial attention across the internet, especially from right-wing groups. Extremists have seized upon them to further fan the flames in the abortion debate, while right-wing politicians have seamlessly integrated them into their campaigns in a way that might lead the cynical to believe that the Center for Medical Progress and the Republican Party are operating together.
Last week, the National Abortion Federation filed — and won a temporary restraining order pending a Monday hearing — an injunction against CMP, arguing that the videos could pose safety risks to some of those depicted. Unfortunately, the injunction covers only material obtained through NAF materials and meetings, not Planned Parenthood, the organisation being skewered by the CMP to the point that it’s been forced to shut down its website.
Planned Parenthood provides a range of family planning and reproductive health services across the United States through over 800 clinics, many of which constitute the only available health care option for low-income women in their communities. The organisation uses funds from a variety of sources to provide prenatal care and referrals, pregnancy prevention, reproductive health counseling, breast cancer screening, sexually transmitted infection screening and treatment, and abortions — of the organisation’s expenditures, just three percent are used on abortion.
In defenses of Planned Parenthood, the US left is very fond of stressing this number, taking a tack that’s painfully familiar — the left is highly squeamish about abortion, as evidenced by the ‘safe, legal, and rare’ slogan that characterises abortion rhetoric in the United States. In conversations about reproductive rights, much of the left puts heavy stress on the idea that access to adequate health care should help reduce the numbers of abortions taking place in the United States — and in the process, it often further stigmatises abortion, transforming it from a routine medical procedure to something patients should be ashamed of. The kneejerk defense of Planned Parenthood on the grounds that the focus of its work isn’t really abortion services does serve as a reminder that fighting the organisation constitutes a war on low income patients who derive key primary care from Planned Parenthood, but the left must be able to talk about this without sidelining abortion.
Abortion happens. While the rate is falling in response to better access to pregnancy prevention services, it’s still a health care necessity, it always will be, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Clinics that offer it, including Planned Parenthood, don’t need to excuse themselves for providing abortions. The left’s insistence on excusing abortion rather than openly defending it reflects the larger problems with the US left, which consistently takes reactive rather than proactive positions. Reproductive rights activists are ‘pro-choice’ in response to the ‘pro-life’ movement, for example, rather than ignoring what the right is doing and identifying as ‘pro-abortion’ — and also pro-family, pro-equal access to health care, pro-sexual education, pro-sex worker rights, pro-reproductive justice — acknowledging that some patients require the procedure and other sexual health needs and there’s no reason to stigmatise that by hiding behind a veil of euphemism.
The notion that abortion should remain a legal and freely accessible procedure shouldn’t be a radical one, yet to listen to the left, sometimes it sounds like it is actually a taboo idea. While activists purport to be pro-reproductive justice, they express extreme unease with abortion as an actual concept — ‘pro-choice, but…’ is a common refrain from the left. Some abortions are more acceptable than others under some rhetoric, for example, and the graphic details of how foetal tissue is collected for donation clearly perturb some on the left, which is precisely why right-wing organisations are releasing these painstakingly orchestrated and staged videos. By playing upon the left’s conflicted emotions about abortion, the right can seize an opportunity to drive a wedge into the crumbling façade of the left.
By increasing the squeamishness factor, the right puts itself in an ideal position to encourage lawmakers to consider more abortion restrictions, and to have more sway over conservative and moderate Democrats looking for excuses to support limitations on abortion access. 20 week bans, spreading like wildfire across the US, are one example — and if these videos are successful, lawmakers may begin banning foetal tissue donation despite its incalculable scientific value.
Unless the left can push back on this, it will always be one step behind the anti-abortion right, and behind schemes like these. As long as the response to videos assaulting abortion rights and access to abortion at facilities like Planned Parenthood clinics is ‘well, they don’t really spend that much money on abortion anyway,’ the left has already lost, even if it doesn’t want to admit it.
Planned Parenthood can allocate its funding however it chooses, and it has found what it believes to be the most efficient and effective method of distributing funds. Evidence-based medicine shows that it’s demonstrably more cost-effective to provide people with pregnancy prevention tools than it is to perform abortions, thus making it sensible to dedicate much more funding to the provision of birth control and education, but people aren’t citing evidence-based medicine in their defenses of Planned Parenthood. Rather, they’re justifying the organisation’s existence on the grounds that it doesn’t invest that many resources in doing something that people find icky and unpleasant, and anyway, it’s working to reduce the number of abortions needed in the first place.
Until abortion can become value neutral in the United States, the battles of the left will be lost before they can even begin. The right knows this, which is why it rests so smugly on the pageviews associated with these films.