Why the Republican Assault on Planned Parenthood Is Morally Wrong and Economically Stupid

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

22 September 15

 

he Republican assault on Planned Parenthood is filled with lies and distortions, and may even lead to a government shutdown.

The only thing we can say for sure about it is it’s already harming women’s health.

For distortions, start with presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s contention at last week’s Republican debate that a video shows “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ “

Wrong. In fact, the anti-abortion group that made that shock video added stock footage of a fully-formed fetus in order to make it seem as if that’s what Planned Parenthood intended.

But as Donald Trump has demonstrated with cunning bravado, presidential candidates can say anything these days regardless of the truth and get away with it.

At least elected members of Congress should be held to a standard of responsible public service.

Yet last Friday, the House voted 241-187 to block Planned Parenthood’s federal funds for a year.

This may lead to another government shutdown. Funding for the government runs out at the end of the month, and several dozen House Republicans have said they won’t vote for a funding bill that includes money for Planned Parenthood.

This is, quite frankly, nuts.

A strong moral case can be made that any society that respects women must respect their right to control their own bodies.

There’s also an important economic case for effective family planning.

Public investments in family planning—enabling women to plan, delay, or avoid pregnancy– make economic sense because reproductive rights are also productive rights.

When women have control over their lives they can contribute even more to the economy, better break the glass ceiling, equalize the pay gap, and much more.

Consider Colorado’s highly successful family planning program. Over the past six years, the Colorado health department has offered teenagers and low-income women free long-acting birth control that prevents pregnancy over several years.

As a result, pregnancy and abortion rates plunged—by about 40 percent among teenagers across the state between 2009 to 2013.

In 2009, half of all first births to women in the poorest areas of Colorado occurred before they turned 21.

But by 2014, half of first births did not occur until the women had turned 24. This difference gives young women time to finish their education and obtain better jobs.

Nationally, evidence shows that public investments in family planning result in net public savings of about $13.6 billion a year—over $7 for every public dollar spent.

This sum doesn’t include the billions of additional dollars saved by enabling women – who may not be financially able to raise a child and do not want to have a child or additional children – to stay out of poverty.

Despite what Republicans claim, Planned Parenthood doesn’t focus on providing abortions.

In 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, its services included nearly nearly 500,000 breast examinations, 400,000 Pap tests, nearly 4.5 million tests for sexually transmitted illnesses and treatments.

Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive services are one of the major reasons we don’t have more abortions in the United States.

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine calls Planned Parenthood’s contraception services one of “the single greatest effort[s] to prevent the unwanted pregnancies that result in abortions.”

Planned Parenthood’s services are particularly important to poor and lower-income women. At least 78 percent of its patients have incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

Planned Parenthood gets around $450 million a year from the federal government. Most of this is Medicaid reimbursements for low-income patients, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The rest is mainly for contraceptive counseling, pregnancy testing and other services.

Federal money can only be used for abortion in rare circumstances.

Even so, over the last five years congressional Republicans have cut 10 percent of the Title X federal budget for family planning, which pays for services such as cancer screenings and HIV tests.

And now they want to do away with it altogether.

This never used to be a partisan issue. After all, Title X was signed into law in 1970 by Richard Nixon.

Obviously, the crass economic numbers don’t nearly express the full complexity of the national debate around abortion and family planning.

But they help make the case that we all benefit when society respects women to control their bodies and plan their families.

The attack on Planned Parenthood is not just morally wrong. It’s also economically stupid.

Frank Rich Thinks Donald Trump Will Fix Campaign Finance Law

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

22 September 15

 

Less than 24 hours after his Veep sweep, the New York Magazine columnist is taken for a sucker.

teve M at No More Mister Nice Blog largely puts paid to the dilettante's wet dream that Frank Rich has loosed upon the world on the subject of the Libidinous Visitor. (There's a reason they set Guys and Dolls in New York. There are more obvious marks walking around there than anywhere else in the world.) But there's more rancid meat on the decaying bone to be examined. There is, for example, this passage, which Rich apparently wrote from an office in the Op-Ed department of Neverland.

(It took me a while to get this far through the piece because I nearly drowned in movie references.)

nother change Trump may bring about is a GOP rethinking of its embrace of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision unleashing unlimited campaign contributions. Citizens United was supposed to be a weapon wielded mainly against Democrats, but Trump is using it as a club to bludgeon Republicans. "I'm using my own money," he said when announcing his candidacy. "I'm not using lobbyists, I'm not using donors. I don't care. I'm really rich." By Washington etiquette, it's a no-no for a presidential candidate to gloat about his wealth. Especially if you're a wealthy Republican, it's axiomatic that you follow the George H.W. Bush template of pretending to savor pork rinds. But Trump has made a virtue of flaunting his fortune and glitzy lifestyle — and not just because that's the authentic Trump. His self-funding campaign may make him more effective than any Democrat in turning Citizens United into a political albatross for those who are enslaved to it.

In addition to being a complete non sequitur, this argument also is all my bollocks. How exactly does Trump's tasteless flaunting of his wealth work against the politics created by the destruction of our tepid campaign-finance laws? Look, Donald Trump is a tasteless clown. That means we should knuckle the Koch Brothers and elect Bernie Sanders, who has made repealing Citizens United a litmus test for his judicial appointments? Does any human actually think this way? Also, does Rich think that the people are supporting Trump because of their disgust with money in politics? Or because they realize that all politics is a sham of a façade? People are supporting Trump because he says the right nasty things about the people who scare them. Period. If and when he loses, those people will move on to the next shrewd bigot who steps up to the mic.

I stopped reading when Rich got to the point where he argued that the Trump candidacy would have an equal (if opposite) effect on American politics that the failed Goldwater campaign did in 1964. Frank Rich looks at a freak show and sees a movement. That is such a New York thing to do. But his peroration certainly rang familiar.

If that's entertainment, so be it. If Hillary Clinton's campaign or the Republican Party is reduced to rubble along the way, we can live with it. Trump will not make America great again, but there's at least a chance that the chaos he sows will clear the way for those who can.

Back during the 2000 campaign, Rich was similarly distressed with the state of American politics, especially by the presence of Al Gore, that boring twerp, on the ballot. This is what Rich wrote:

In the true Clinton manner, both are also chameleons, ready to don new guises in a flash—from Mr. Gore's down-home wardrobe to Mr. Bush's last-minute emergence as a champion of campaign finance reform, patients' rights and clean air. The substantive disputes between the men are, in truth, minimal in a prosperous post-cold-war era when both parties aspire to Rockefeller Republicanism (literally so in that each standard-bearer is the prince of a brand-name American dynasty).

Gee, too bad there wasn't a Donald Trump around that year to reduce campaigns to rubble, and to expose the phoniness of the system, and to unleash a cascade of reform throughout the system through his renegade performance skills.

Wait? What? There was?

How'd that work out anyway??