The Attack on Planned Parenthood is Personal

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

Article first published as The Attack on Planned Parenthood Feels Personal on Technorati. (link is now broken)

About 26 years ago, I was a teenage girl as HIV was just starting to hit the newspapers and was still the “gay disease”. I’d fallen head over heels over a guy at school who was smart, talented, funny, and absolutely wrong for me (weren’t they all, back then) and I wanted to “do it” in the worst way.

I went down to my local Planned Parenthood, and with minimal fuss and bother, and without costing me a dime, I got my very first pap smear, a thorough physical, and a prescription for the pill, with instructions on how to use it. They also advised that I should use condoms and absolutely didn’t believe that I was still a virgin. I didn’t get pregnant, didn’t catch an incurable disease, and my heart was only a little bit broken when our relationship ended.

I got married at 19 (still with the not so bright choices). I continued to use Planned Parenthood for my pap smears and birth control until I was finally covered by an employer’s health care plan in my mid twenties. A Planned Parenthood doctor diagnosed the abnormal cells in my pap smear that I had cryosurgery for when I was twenty-four, and they gave me advice on what birth control to use after my oldest (planned) son was born.

Now Planned Parenthood is under (continued) attack in Congress. In the city of Racine, WI, 3,200 use Planned Parenthood as their primary health care provider – just like I did until I got health insurance. They receive pap smears, pregnancy tests, HIV testing and counseling, and that health care saves lives, just like it saved mine. And not one penny of Federal money pays for a single abortion.

Let me repeat that. Not one penny of Federal money pays for abortion. This has been the case since the mid 1970s. Federal money accounts for 30% of Planned Parenthood’s budget, in Racine WI, in Kansas City, MO, in Tallahassee, Fl, all over the country. And in little towns and rural areas between the cities, where Planned Parenthood is the only provider for hundreds of thousand or millions of women, if Planned Parenthood loses that Federal money, women will die.

For now, until the next vote, Planned Parenthood is safe. But be ready, because the next vote is coming, and Planned Parenthood will again be in the sights of those who are using it to gain political advantage. So before the next round, speak out, blog out, and support Planned Parenthood.

I want to expand here on my original article, to discuss the concept of the personal as political.  It is a concept integral to feminism, but applicable to many other areas of life.  The idea is that no political idea can ever be viewed solely in the “pure light of reason” because politics, by its nature, has significant consequences for real people.  It cannot be purely theoretical any more than than any other science involving human subjects.

There is, however, one big distinction between politics and other sciences that involve human subjects — in order to experiment in other fields, such as psychology or sociology, you must carefully evaluate the risks to your human subjects, and then submit the study design to a review board of fellow scientists for an ethics review.  In politics, however, human subjects research begins the minute a law is passed or an executive order is handed down or a court decision is reached.

This is why utopian political systems invariably don’t work as advertised (this includes socialism, communism, and libertariansim, as well as Objectivism), and why the “Devil’s Advocate” argument that starts with “Let’s pretend for a second that the world is like X” are inherently dishonest and useful only to identify those who are trying to sell you something.

Politics affects lives, and there’s nowhere in the world where people are not impacted by it.  That is why when you are building a political ideology, you can’t rely solely on philosophy and logic.  You have to consider the real people and real consequences, and you have to take actual, rather than idealized human nature into account.

So when you decide to pass a law that directly impacts approximately 0.04% of the population of a minority population in France, but do it in such a sweeping way that you are thereby including the entire minority population under the tag “possible terrorists”  as one of your defined variables, your experiment would never, ever pass a peer review.

 

Related articles

• Ohio Committee Votes To Defund Planned Parenthood (huffingtonpost.com)
• Planned Parenthood bill gets panel’s OK (dispatch.com)
• Texas lawmaker seeks to reverse Planned Parenthood ban (rawstory.com)
• Planned Parenthood’s “Fight Is Hardly Over” (newhavenindependent.org)