Responding to Planned Parenthood Defenders

All of these are great responses to the lies we have been hearing for the last few weeks, but I thought I’d call out a few.

CLAIM #3- Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of women’s health services in the country and defunding it would harm women, especially women of low income.

IS IT TRUE? Nope. As Democrats For Life explains, the claim is only true if you include abortions. Community health centers provide care to ten times the amount of women that Planned Parenthood does if abortions are excluded (and Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms but community health centers do). Care for low-income women would go on without a hitch without Planned Parenthood. You can breathe a sigh of relief now.

Jon Vaala

Crazy that you keep hearing that “without Planned Parenthood, where would women go for crucial services?” yet the only service that Planned Parenthood offers that most of the other centers don’t is abortion. In fact, the other community health centers provide more services. Go figure.

CLAIM #4 The makers of the undercover videos are extremists! Or terrorists?!?!?

IS IT TRUE? So what. The implicit accusation here is that the videos are made by pro-life extremists and are therefore false. Unfortunately for defenders of Planned Parenthood, that violates fallacy of origins otherwise known as the genetic fallacy as well as the ad hominem fallacy. Students of basic logic know that this sort of claim is irrelevant in disproving the claims of the video makers.

Ah, the ad hominem. The easiest way to shut up the dissenting people. Easiest response? “So what.” Whether or not the attack on the speaker is true or false doesn’t affect the argument stated.

CLAIM #5- Planned Parenthood’s abortion services only equate to about 3% of what it does. The remaining 97% are “good” services that would be hurt if PP got defunded.

IS IT TRUE? False and the devil is in the details. As numerous sources have pointed out, including the NY Post among others, the figure Planned Parenthood uses to come up with that figure includes every single “service” it provides including handing out condoms, morning after pills, etc. It also separates out all the services it gives out to women who have an abortion thereby vastly inflating the number of services. A much better account of the percentage of what PP does can be ascertained by looking at its revenue stream. When you look at PP’s financial bottom line, abortion provides PP with at least 37% of its total revenue and probably much higher than that. Therefore, we can safely say that abortions are not a “minimal aspect” of the services that Planned Parenthood provides.

Yeah, love people that manipulate statistics to prove their point. Love it.

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