Planned Parenthood

Today, in the United States Congress, the Republican party is squaring off for a fight. They plan to shut the government down again. This is very much like a little child stomping off when he doesn't get his way, but the effects of a government shutdown won't be good for our economy and won't be good for America.

Lo, let us put this plainly: Republicans do not want what is good for America if they vote to shut down the government.

But let us examine this further: What is it that Planned Parenthood does? Planned Parenthood is a national franchise of clinics that are funded with donations and government funds to offer free healthcare to anyone who walks in. Most of their patients are woman and most of those women are not well off. Where does the money they get go?

By and large, as you can see from the chart above, Planned Parenthood is spending the bulk of their money—76%—on STD testing and treatment as well as contraception. STD treatment and testing reduces the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, which can cripple. Some STDs can also sterilize women, so if you think that women ought to be able to have babies, you should be in favor of Planned Parenthood. 

Bristol Palin cannot seem to practice what she preaches

Then there is contraception. Since contraception tends to reduce abortions and you do not like abortions, you ought to be in favor of Planned Parenthood, unless your position is, like Bristol Palin, that abstinence is the only acceptable to not get pregnant. Unfortunately, for Ms. Palin, that does not seem to be working out very well for her, as she is pregnant once again—out of wedlock with her second child conceived while she was telling others to not have sex. I think that is a big problem for her, even though Planned Parenthood also offers services to married persons as well as single persons who want family planning options.

Here is what the opposition to Planned Parenthood is, more than anything else. It is about denial of the same kinds of health services that wealthy people have to the poor.

Carly Fiorina can afford an abortion. It is legal, it is available and there are still physicians in the United States who will do the procedure. The wives of all of the other Presidential candidates can afford an abortion and they can get one any time they want to. They can also get contraception, cancer screening, STD testing and treatment and any medical service their heart desires.

Carly Fiorina wants poor people to not be able to get healthcare

But Carly Fiorina and the rest of the Republicans do not want poor people to get any of these services. They don't like the fact that poor people can walk into a free Planned Parenthood clinic and see a physician, get medical services and go on with their lives.

You can see this clearly in the way that Republicans absolutely oppose Medicaid expansion in all of their states (with very few exceptions) because they want to punish poor people by reserving healthcare for the very rich. Under the Republican philosophy, poor people are to be denied any access to competent physicians and other healthcare services because they are poor and it's all their fault. Republican policies had nothing to do with this, either (they believe that the teacers' unions caused the 2008 economic crisis and not the banks, the investment bankers and the policies espoused by Republicans since Reagan.

This leads me to a theory howard Zinn proposed in his book, A People's History of the United States. He suggested that, the reason why the wealthy people wanted poor people to stay poor is so that they could pit them against the people they really didn't like—black people. I have to suggest that, after the constant rhetoric I hear coming out of Donald Trump (and not refuted by any of the other Republican Presidential candidates) this extends to Chinese people and Mexican people (as well as those with those ancestries) also.

So, in order to keep the "nonwhites" down, we must have lots of white poor people, whose position is that, at least they have no African, Mexican and Chinese ancestry. These poor white people will have nasty, short, brutish lives without any possibility of ever seeing a physician.

Now, that is a pretty extreme stance, but, as I look at the current Republican rhetoric, I have to wonder if it is really true and that Republicans really want to build an America like that. I would love to see some well-researched refutations of this.

Mini-abortions are happening monthly!!!!!

In 1996, Senator Bob Dole ran against Clinton and lost. In 1997, he starred in a series of Viagra ads. Republican lawmakers wanted to require that insurance companies cover Viagra prescriptions and women's groups wondered aloud why it was that insurance companies would pay for Viagra when they were not required to pay for birth control pills.

As a result, more than half of states now require insurance policies that cover other prescription drugs to also cover all FDA-approved contraceptive drugs and devices, as well as related medical services. This includes Arkansas, where Jim Huckabee signed the measure into law. In fact, this was a Republican initiative, started in 1997.

Now, all of a sudden we have the "Life Begins At Fertilization" movement. Rick Santorum is saying that birth control gives people the ability to ignore the consequences of their actions (and here I thought that birth control allowed people to control the consequences of their actions and plan accordingly). All of the Presidential candidates have signed on to this, notwithstanding the fact that this puts them well to the right of the State of Mississippi, whose voters just overwhelmingly struck down a "life begins at conception" amendment to their constitution.

The Birth Control pill does the following: It prevents implantation of a fertilized ovum. That is how it works. Now, I'm not talking about the "Morning After Pill," which is just a stronger dose of the regular Birth Control Pill. Because of this, the Catholic Church has decided to call the pill an "abortifactant."

Nutcase Republicans are leaping on this term asserting, I suppose, that there are millions of "little abortions" being practiced monthly by women. This is why I find Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's little gathering Thursday, February 16th so repugnant. He gathered a group of old men together to discuss women's health. Not one woman was allowed to testify—not even Ann Coulter! Then he compared his work to deny women access to contraception through insurance to the work of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Huh? "Let my people go?"

He styled the hearing a discussion on whether contraception rule violates religious liberty and then only invited people to testify who already believe the rule violates religious liberty. There was no attempt to be fair, no attempt to invite any views not shared by chairman Issa.

If you are a woman, if you know a woman, if you understand anything about women, you'll be horrified by this paternalistic panel.

In El Salvador, if a woman has a miscarriage, she is placed under suspicion of murdering her child. If a woman travels outside of the country and has a miscarriage or (heaven forbid!) an abortion, she is arrested as soon as she returns to the country. For murder.

This is where Rick Santorum and, presumably, every other Republican running for the nomination to be their party's candidate for President wants to take the United States. The Pill will be outlawed. Women will be driven back to the 1950s to the time before The Pill. I'll bet condoms will be taken off the shelves of drugstores. And any woman who worries about "being late" with her period will be labeled a "slut," or worse. The concept of family planning will go out the window.

Please tell me I'm wrong here.