According to an article by the Guttmacher Institute in 2016, “publicly funded family planning services,” such as Planned Parenthood, “helped women to avoid about 2 million unintended pregnancies, which would have resulted in nearly 1 million unintended births and nearly 700,000 abortions.”
Naturally, the pro-abortion rights versus anti-abortion debate is a deeply personal one. However, don’t let misinformation play a role in your opinion. When many politicians claim that defunding Planned Parenthood will stop abortions, they’re not telling you the whole truth.
Organizations like Planned Parenthood are essential to family planning and reproductive health. Unfortunately, controversy over the services performed at these clinics, has become a major threat to their continued existence. Though Planned Parenthood does perform abortions, according to an article published on NPR.org in 2015, only “3 percent of the services it provided [in 2014] were abortion-related.”
The major driving force behind the movement to defund Planned Parenthood is the notion that federal funds are paying for abortions. However, this is simply not the case. According to the same article from NPR.org, Planned Parenthood receives about $500 million dollars annually in federal funds- which makes up about 40 percent of the organization’s total revenue.
These funds come from two programs: Medicaid, a health care program, and Title X, a family planning program, both aimed at lower-income Americans. The most important thing to note here is that “Title X does not allow federal funds to be used for abortions.” Similarly, “the 1977 Hyde Amendment dictated that federal Medicaid funds could only be used to fund abortions in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother.”
Essentially, the federal funds that Planned Parenthood receives cannot and are not used to fund abortions, aside from the aforementioned exceptions. Therefore, defunding Planned Parenthood will not have any impact on their abortion services whatsoever.
What will happen is that Planned Parenthood will lack the necessary funding to carry out the majority of their other services such as cancer screenings and contraceptive access for both men and women. Shutting down Planned Parenthood because of just one of the services they provide would cut off access to health care for millions of Americans.
Though the debate surrounding federal funding for Planned Parenthood is still going on, this is only one facet of the larger issue. For more information about Planned Parenthood, please visit their website at https://www.plannedparenthood.org/