Blue Collar Scientist

Ron over at Bay of Fundie has an outstanding article about Planned Parenthood, and how radical Christian extremists make huge amounts of money attacking them. But what I found most interesting was information about Planned Parenthood itself.

So of the 10.5 million services provided, abortion only makes up 3%, a mere pittance. The way the fundies talk, you’d think that PP is a ravenous baby-eating monster roaming the countryside, instead of a provider of many fertility-related services, of which abortion barely even registers on the chart.

Look at that chart again. What’s the biggest piece? Contraception, at 38% of all services offered. They also point out in that legend that 81% of all patients seen are provided contraception. That means that PP is preventing many pregnancies from ever happening. PP is actually reducing the number of abortions needed, because many of their patients won’t get pregnant in the first place!

Yep. But Ron, the second-to-last sentence explains everything. Planned Parenthood is preventing many pregnancies from ever happening, which is a big no-no amongst radical Christians. Contraception encourages their women to be loose, is how I heard it.

Seriously, go over there and read the full post. I’ve been following the abortion debate since I was a kid back in the 70’s, and I have never seen a well-sourced discussion of Planned Parenthood and what they actually do - and that speaks volumes about the uselessness of the media coverage of the issue. I learned a lot from Ron’s post.

Tags: abortion, contraception, Planned Parenthood, sexually transmitted disease, STD

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under religious extremism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.