what we miss in the abortion debate and should be emphasized when we talk about it.

[CTyankee]

During a woman's visit a Planned Parenthood clinic for abortion care she also receives reliable information on her options to avoid another unwanted pregnancy. (To be clear: I am not talking about rape victims, also PP's also care for these women).

When I worked at a PP in CT, counseling was available on all forms of contraception that is best suited to the woman herself. Her life, her obstacles to family planning, be they financial or scarcity of availability, how the contraceptives work, and answering her questions. PP can be an important health care aspect of their overall health care picture.

So an abortion can be not just helpful at the time but can be extremely necessary to a woman's overall health care and decisions about child bearing going forward.

I think we should regard Planned Parenthood as a health provider in communities, where women can receive valuable information about their own health care going forward and if she presents such problems as high blood pressure or breast exams.

[Alice Kramden]

1. Absolutely - it is women's health care

and that is how it should be framed.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. And that advice is why Texas and other states want to defund PP completely.

[CTyankee]

8. Yes. And a good reason for MORE EDUCATION about PP itself.

I'm not saying they they don't do that already; I am sure they do. Rich donors can fund public education about what other things PP does. In some places around the country, PP is the only place that women can get accurate information that help them plan their lives going forward.

[Girard442]

3. People who want to defund PP don't like contraception either.

They want "A Handmaid's Tale" type of women's health care only.

[Wounded Bear]

4. You're preaching to the choir here...

and trying to convince anti-choice activists of the good that PP does is an excercise in futility. We all pretty know what you're talking about, but trying to educate the willfully ignorant approaches the futility of teaching calculus to a mule.

[CTyankee]

9. OK, they are not the ones that need PP the most. In fact, of course, they prevent that information

or try to.

When my kids were in their pre-teen years I got a copy of "Our Bodies, Ourselvs" in paperback and left it on the coffee table in the living room. It was dogeared in no time. I knew there were questions that my son and two daughters had that they wouldn't ask me. That book gave them the kind of information that many parents are uncomfortable discussing. And having that book as a resource was a great thing.

[Cinnamonspice]

5. I regard them as healthcare providers.

I generally look at them as specializing in reproductive healthcare. Maybe they're also good with their hormone therapy. They can do regular breast exams. I don't like how they argue using people who only rely on them for healthcare though. The people truly only relying on them for healthcare need additional resources.

That's because I tried to go to them needing an ultrasound because I felt something was wrong (not pregnant). They said they didn't do that and neither did any of the Planned Parenthoods in the area. I found a great obgyn closer to me who was able to help. It turns out I have fibroids that I'm using BC pills to control and I might end up needing surgery in the future. This is something PP could not help me with. Sorry to get personal there. It sort of annoyed me because I knew they had the ultrasound equipment to run that test. They just were not willing to use it for my issue.

My other thing was when I was trying to get an appointment, there was nothing for my issue online, so I tried to call. I spent a lot of time on the phone listening to a recording telling me I can also go online and abortion patients, please stay on the line.


So, it is important for women to have a place to terminate a pregnancy safely. It's also important to have a place that can tell you all about birth control and help you access it. However, I would say their specialty is reproductive healthcare specifically in regards to not getting pregnant or terminating a pregnancy. There are a few PP places that do ultrasounds for women wanting to have the baby and a few that do mammograms, but it's not very common.

[CTyankee]

10. Of course, PP can't "do it all." They are constricted by budget and constant fighting in courts

to stay viable and provide safe, legal abortions. When I worked at PPC of Connecticut we referred patients out for follow up services PP didn't do. The trick is figuring out new ways to get them in those states that tie up PP locally and financially.

[brewens]

6. My best old conservative friend that died a couple years ago agreed with me on a lot of

things, especially religion and abortion.

On religion, they made all that up. On abortion, they way we talked about it anyway, if some girl has nothing going for her, doesn't want anything to do with the guy, and wants to save all of us a million bucks down the road, she needs to do what's right for her. A lot of real conservatives would agree with that, they just don't dare say so these days.

This guy was one of my first bosses at the Skippers he owned. Reagan was his hero, you could never talk him down from that, but a lot of what Reagan was about, he was against, you just could never get him to see that.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. Abortion care is health care. Reproductive care is health care.

[CTyankee]

11. Of course. And information is power.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

13. It's not clear to me how deflecting the discussion toward other services PP and independent

clinics provide helps in the “abortion debate.”

[CTyankee]

15. It counters lies with information, if nothing else. The thing is, PP is only a piece of the picture.

As things are now, because of the hold minorities in some states have will continue to be a reality. There was a lengthy article in the NYT this Sunday about how basically we're screwed because of local and state laws which all work to OUR detriment. In the past we had the SCOTUS to resolve this. And I hate to say this but RBG not retiring while a Democrat was in the White House was a serious mistake. I love and revere (and once met!) RBG but I agree her decision to stay had a bad outcome.

[Greybnk48]

12. Agree with everything you said. But there is no "debate" about abortion.

There's a 48 year long tantrum by religiously insane men and their concubines; a small group that continues to scream and foam at the mouth about women gaining reproductive freedom almost 50 years ago, including education AND birth control.

According to these nutjobs, women are chattel and should not be permitted to abort or block a man's seed no matter how it got in their uterus. It's the tired old rule by force or dominance. And that's part of their religion.

Planned Parenthood undermines this.

[CTyankee]

14. I agree. And our view to a large extent has been accepted by most people.

I believe that there are folks in Texas and other places where PP's very existence is at risk, are part of a "grievance" list the pukes dreamed up to salve the grudges these people have. And voting laws are being tailor made to ring that one particular bell. The grievance list is their political platform.

[Mad_Machine76]

16. One other really important we need to make over and over again

is that if Planned Parenthood is properly funded and women (and men) receive proper comprehensive sex education and access to contraception, it will drastically reduce the need for abortions. Anti-choicers and their Republican benefactors basically keep boxing people in. They continually cut and/or withhold funding of Planned Parenthood, they demand unscientific "abstinence-only" education in schools, don't want teenagers to have access to contraception (and some of them even don't want it for adults either and sometimes even purposely conflate it with abortion), which result in more unplanned and unwanted pregnancies which they do everything possible to encourage pregnant people to carry those pregnancies to term BUT then they also fight against increased assistance for childcare, public assistance, etc., basically anything that would help alleviate the burden of caring for an unplanned child, forcing poverty onto people. All of this not even to mention the health risks of carrying a pregnancy to term, especially among teenagers, nor pregnancies that result from rape or incest. Republicans and right-wingers are just the worst.

[CTyankee]

17. That is a thoughtful and reasonable argument.

These people are basically centered on their own views that sex is bad and women are inherently flawed ever since the myth of Adam and Eve came into existence. Women are flawed from the get-go, no matter what. Bad things are what people deserve for their bad behavior. People who believe this should never get elected as our lawmakers. That's obvious.

[Mad_Machine76]

18. Yup

Also, folks that don't actually understand the science of reproduction and/or intentionally peddle false or misleading information or force others to recite it and don't understand that people's bodies can't "shut it down" when it comes to rape and incest and that the rhythm method doesn't reliably work or don't believe that babies conceived from rape and incest are a "blessing in disguise"

[CTyankee]

19. The whole scenario was laid out in a long NYT piece I think by Ezra Klein. He analyzes this in the

larger picture of the rightwing's attempt at taking control of the levers of power in our government. The antichoice movement gets corralled into an overall plan, in his scenario. It is so frightening I threw out the section of the paper it was in. This is a Big Plan, full of everything the Right wants to do, not just legal abortion.

We see this sometimes where people vulnerable to the anti-choice message also get a heavy load of the rest of the Agenda and then helps vote in a RW candidate (who of course is anti-choice).

Ezra sees that SCOTUS is our last bastion but look what happened there. I just wish RBG had retired while we had a Democrat as President.

[Mad_Machine76]

20. And I wish

Obama had been able to replace Scalia like he should have been able to. That was an outrage that somehow needs to be rectified. And them replacing Ginsburg before her body was cold in the ground was another.

[Caliman73]

21. There was that Facebook Post about bodily autonomy that I think summed it up best.

I totally agree that Planned Parenthood if vital for women's health care. Planned is the emphasis. Education, women's health, and pre-natal health are all services which PP provides WAY more often than termination of unwanted pregnancies, yet that is what some fools focus on because they want to control women's bodies and lives. They want to punish women for having sex (mind you, they only want to punish women) there is rarely any discussion from the anti-choice side about the responsibility men have for unwanted pregnancy.

The problem is, as other people pointed out, that people who are anti-choice, are typically not anti-choice for any rational reason. I can't say honestly, that NONE have rational reasons, just that the loudest voices are typically the dumbest. Typically those who are against abortion for their own personal and rational reasons, simply choose not to get an abortion. They don't try to impose their own choices onto other people.

It is always good to have information because there are a lot of people who may have an opinion, but not really any strong leaning either way. Those people may be able to be persuaded with information. The ones screaming outside of the clinics, are usually not that type of person and will not be dissuaded by information.

You know what will dissuade them? When they or their daughter gets pregnant and they don't want to go through with the pregnancy, but then, they will sneak away and terminate the pregnancy and get right back to screaming outside the clinic.

[FakeNoose]

22. Why aren't these guys in Texas getting vasectomies?

They don't have to go to Planned Parenthood for it, but it's always an option. A guy with a vasectomy has got nothing to worry about, am I right?

[CTyankee]

23. I think the whole idea of one scares the bejeezus out of them.

Like alluva sudden they are too delicate to have a minor snip.

[Zeitghost]

24. I've always said

That if your goal is fewer abortions, you should wholeheartedly support PP. They likely prevent far more than they perform.

[ecstatic]

25. so true. nt