As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Of the silly Planned Parenthood debate
Neco
Worthless GarbageRegistered User regular
Worthless GarbageRegistered User regular
Yeah. I'm going there. If y'all want to turn this into an abortion topic, that's cool. I mean, the thread will be shutdown faster than @Irond Will can say "anime!" but I mean, if that's where you wanna take it, then sure, go for it I guess.
If you are wondering why I would say that abortion isn't really the topic about a thread about Planned Parenthood, let me tell you a little about them! (Of course, by that I mean let me shamelessly copy and paste)
That still isn't everything. They offer birth control as well, so that abortions don't have to happen in the first place!
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/
And they treat STD's as well!
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/stds-hiv-safer-sex/
Did you know that many of their clinics also offer services to transgender people and can even prescribe hormones? Well they do that too!
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/ask-dr-cullins/
Pretty awesome stuff, huh?
But wait, no, not so much according to many. The US is currently facing yet another potential government shutdown over headbutting about Planned Parenthood. Namely that House Republicans want to defund it entirely, and as of today, voted to do just that!
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/18/441497807/house-approves-bill-to-cease-funding-planned-parenthood
Obviously this won't make it past the senate, but this is a thing that our government is choosing to make an issue of. Or, as Gus Billirakis puts it:
Or as Diana DeGette responded:
And so here is our current standstill. Thoughts? Words?
What this thread is:
A discussion of planned parenthood as a government service, and its relevance to our day to day lives. Please feel free to discuss whether this service should be publicly funded or why it shouldn't in your opinion. Government shutdowns over silly things are ok to discuss as well.
What this thread is not:
A podium for you to air out your personal opinions about abortion. Trust me, considering the subject matter, I KNOW this is going to be difficult, but I think we can do it! I have faith in you, please don't let me down!
But enough talk, HAVE AT YOU!
If you are wondering why I would say that abortion isn't really the topic about a thread about Planned Parenthood, let me tell you a little about them! (Of course, by that I mean let me shamelessly copy and paste)
There are many health issues that only affect women. This section focuses on women's health issues.
You may also want to read about other women's sexual health topics, such as abortion, birth control, pregnancy, and STDs.
There is much we can do to protect our health. Routine visits with a health care provider can help prevent illness and can find problems that may need treatment. Pelvic exams, Pap tests, and screenings for breast cancer are all vital health care needs for women. And for women with abnormal Pap test results, tests and treatments used to prevent cervical cancer — colposcopy, cryotherapy, and LEEP — can save lives.
Our goal at Planned Parenthood is to give you up-to-date, clear information that helps you better understand your reproductive health. We hope these pages give you the facts and tools you need to protect your health and the health of women you care about.
If you have more questions or concerns about your health, we can help. Staff at your local Planned Parenthood health center can talk with you and help you get the care you need.
- See more at: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/womens-health/#sthash.XLimbH5R.dpuf
That still isn't everything. They offer birth control as well, so that abortions don't have to happen in the first place!
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/
And they treat STD's as well!
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/stds-hiv-safer-sex/
Did you know that many of their clinics also offer services to transgender people and can even prescribe hormones? Well they do that too!
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/ask-dr-cullins/
Pretty awesome stuff, huh?
But wait, no, not so much according to many. The US is currently facing yet another potential government shutdown over headbutting about Planned Parenthood. Namely that House Republicans want to defund it entirely, and as of today, voted to do just that!
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/18/441497807/house-approves-bill-to-cease-funding-planned-parenthood
Obviously this won't make it past the senate, but this is a thing that our government is choosing to make an issue of. Or, as Gus Billirakis puts it:
"Taxpayers should not be forced to financially support organizations whose behavior is at best unethical and possibly illegal. When it comes to defunding Planned Parenthood, the issue should not be partisan. This is about protecting the rights of taxpayers — but more importantly, protecting the basic right of human life. I will continue to give a voice to our most fragile Americans who cannot speak for themselves."
Or as Diana DeGette responded:
"In fact, there were over 4 million visits to Planned Parenthood clinics last year, and over 90 percent of this was basic women's health care, and not abortions. So why are we talking about this today? Why are we talking about this legislation? Planned Parenthood does these services, and no federal funds are spent on abortion services that Planned Parenthood does provide. But yet the majority will take the radical step of denying women of the basic health care they need. This radical agenda is wrong — it's wrong for American women, and it's wrong for us, when the federal budget expires in just 13 days."
And so here is our current standstill. Thoughts? Words?
What this thread is:
A discussion of planned parenthood as a government service, and its relevance to our day to day lives. Please feel free to discuss whether this service should be publicly funded or why it shouldn't in your opinion. Government shutdowns over silly things are ok to discuss as well.
What this thread is not:
A podium for you to air out your personal opinions about abortion. Trust me, considering the subject matter, I KNOW this is going to be difficult, but I think we can do it! I have faith in you, please don't let me down!
But enough talk, HAVE AT YOU!
Neco on
+8
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
People want to defund planned parenthood because they don't like abortions
But the number of abortions will skyrocket if planned parenthood funding is gutted because they provide free sex ed and contraceptives
??????
Idgi
Nobody said these people were smart
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Yeah, it doesn't make logical sense if you take it at face value.
Tl;dr folks advocating for defunding are not big fans of women's bodily autonomy .
What you posted is the giant elephant in the room they can't get around
/crazy person
The "??????" is "Women should prevent pregnancy by just holding an aspirin between their knees"
Is there segregation at all of funds currently?
This is a liberal board but I don't think it's a productive or insightful way to view the situation
At the end of the day they think abortion is killing a baby, a helpless infant, and that makes them sad
But the popular political movement doesn't actually care about abortions, it's just a thing they can tick off to rile up their base, like they used to with the gays
If they DID care about abortions, they would embrace comprehensive sex ed and contraceptives, but they don't. This means teens having sex is at least as bad as killing babies OR they don't actually give a shit about abortions
Abortion rates in countries where abortion is illegal is actually comparable to places where it IS legal (at least the last time I saw the data)
It's just more dangerous.
It's a clear hewing to a pathetic morality over a pragmatic view of reality, and is one of the reasons the republican party is floundering and apparently gasping it's last breath
The response from some conservatives about back-alley abortions is fairly cold-hearted. Not all, but the crazier ones.
Yes. Look up the Hyde Amendment. (Which shouldn't exist but that's a separate argument)
You see it a lot in political threads, often in the context of "If candidate X refuses to endorse position Y, I hope he loses, even if his loss is actually worse for Y, because ideological purity!"
Most prolife folks probably legitimately think abortion is murder, and don't just oppose it because they hate women's bodies. (Though there is certainly a correlation between prolife positions and a pretty blase stance towards female autonomy.) But at the end of the day, they are concerned more with whether or not they, personally, did something they can frame as right, than whether or not the world has actually been improved. Because how they personally feel about themselves is concrete, while a bunch of dead babies they've never met is abstract, and concrete trumps abstract.
I'm 100% pro-choice and pro-planned parenthood getting even more funding than they're getting now, and it's always bugged me how much I think this is a legitimate argument I can't come up with a valid counter-argument to.
Being right doesn't mean being able to refute every argument opposed to your position. Sometimes it just means being able to say "so what?"
To be completely fair to their ridiculous ideology, many of these people believe that life beings at conception, so certain kinds of contraceptives are also a no go, (of course sex ed and condoms should still be fine? I mean most people don't take the 'no spilling seed' thing nearly as seriously)
The other counter argument is one that colleges use. One would think their budget is fungible, but often an endowment of say 10 million dollars is set with a specific purpose - this money is to ensure that there is always a French language professor. That money can't be taken away for anything else. Even in the event if a budget shortfall, the interest from that endowment must be used to fund the Frenchie before anything else.
Theoretically planned parenthood can operate similarly, in which federal funds act as as endowment that can only be used for certain things. They certainly do not have unlimited money, and I would imagine they either stop offering abortions or begin charging money if they run out of funding that can be spent on abortions.
Except abortion is legal in this country, and women have the right to that service (among others that PP provides that are crucial to their health). Compromising like that with the pro-life crowd won't stop the GOP trying to burn the whole operation to the ground, they'll see it as blood in the water. Women's health needs to be protected completely, not be thrown under the bus for political capital. Besides, where else are they going to go for it? It's already hard enough for women to get that service in many states, some are virtually impossible to get it due to crippling PP.
I mean, that is basically how it works already, so this is kinda a weird statement. Hyde amendment exists.
Agreed. In many cases simply getting to a provider is a massive hardship thanks to republican legislatures that have shut down many clinics.
Then when you get there you may have to pay for a hotel room because of a 24+ hour waiting period. You may also have to take time off which further amplifies the cost, and that's before you even set foot in a providers office.
You mean the same one that would include each and every <insert monster in human flesh>?
(...They can't time travel, right???)
The government doesn't just give PP money to put in their not abortions bank account. PP does the not abortion services at a tempory loss, documents it, then at the end of the month they show the government what they did that month and then they get paid for it.
Is the lack of funding why the PP website says their abortion services can cost upwards of $1,500?
I think it's more because their services scale based on what the individual can afford. I priced a vasectomy once and all they could really offer was a price range. The range was pretty wide, I think something like 175$-900$ though I may be misremembering.
I find it interesting the cognitive void that has to exist among some folks.
Get rid of abortions. Suddenly abortions and baby murders will all stop.
Get rid of guns... Hey wait a minute.
I think planned parenthood is a fine organization that we shouldn't need. I'm glad it exists. It serves a genuine need. Why we continue to shuffle reproductive autonomy for women into it's own strange category that for some reason is subject to the whim of anyone other than a woman and her doctor makes me confused and angry.
When I see images in the news of people being harassed for going into a building it makes me want to Blues Brother that shit.
...I don't get it?
The idea, I believe, is that some people pretend that banning abortion will stop people from getting abortion, but the second the topic swings to guns, those same people will go on and on about how you can't ban guns there are too many and they'll come through the borders and people will make them in a garage and why bother.
I.E., it can be a huge inconsistency.
But having said that, I do not think it's super relevant to the debate, since it's easy to rationalize anything that different away even if it were unambiguously true.
Young lady kind of suggestively looking into the camera while leaning into it. o.O
I'd really like to know if these sorts of people exist in significant amount. Because All I've ever heard is: "Abstinence only sex ed!" or "It should be left up to the parents...to fail to do anything!" regarding sex-ed. They also are pro-war, pro-death penalty and against social services for children.
One way you know that they don't really believe it's murder is that they don't punish the mother. There's a nice little chart that lays it out, it needs to be updated. It's big, so I have to link.
Sex Education: Abstinence only, which has been shown to be ineffective at reducing teen pregnancies
Birth Control: Fought tooth and nail to let employers deny medical coverage for it
Adoption: Very much against increasing the pool of potential parents by opposing LGBT folks the right to adopt
Welfare: Not the best record when it comes to letting parents get leave and benefits for their kids.
Planned Parenthood: Abortion is a very small part of day-to-day operations, and probably prevent more abortions than they cause. Literally lying to try and get the place defunded.
Don't get me wrong: they definitely think a fetuses is a person and needs to be saved. But there a massive overlap between this belief and very regressive attitudes towards women. "Saving babies" is a sweet way to justify punishing that harlot for being such a slut.
Well, the real burden would be on them to do one major thing. They'd need to define some type of objective harm being done that did not rely on religious mumbo jumbo or spiritual hokum. I'm amenable to limiting elective abortions after about 30 weeks of gestation, since that's about when the brain really starts to develop and work. However outside of that I don't see any real way they can define it that holds any medical weight. Until the fetus' brain is developed enough we could say it perhaps is consciously aware in a true sense, I don't see what the problem is. Without a functional brain a fetus has more in common with a botfly or a tapeworm than a child. It's the brain, and only that, which we can say scientifically delineates when it crosses over into something that is taxonomically human.
But the thing is, largely, the right does not believe in any sensible restrictions. I think most of them have completely drunk the personhood koolaid and are ready to jump on this. In all my time, talking to many different people, I have yet to meet one person who was ever persuadable to change their position even slightly. I mean, online you never expect to do that, but I've talked before with family members and people I know well and they are tuned like robots. They regurgitate this line that when I pair them down enough through debate reveals an ugly strain of puritanism and even when I tell them that this kind of thinking is unconstitutional they either freeze in place, and carry on with some other discussion, or yell an epitet like "Baby killer!" It's not limited to abortion either, like I said before it relates to all areas of sex. The funniest part? Many of them are people who've even had sex before marriage and yet now they act like they can't remember their past indiscretions and want to punish anyone who does the same as harshly as they can. It's really quite scary.
I know it's silly, because it's still a big leap, but sometimes when I see the rhetoric get really bad I wonder fearfully if the military might try to stage a coup of Bernie were to win the election. I've read a lot of dispatches from the Military Religious Freedom foundation and they make it sound like there's a massive infestation of dominionism in the ranks. I worry that at some point if we start winning victories on this front that they're going to do something crazy and stupid that might get a lot of people killed. It might not be a coup, but I do remember that especially when it comes to abortion that many people were willing to kill in the past. The only thing that changed was they started winning legislative victories. Since then, the fervor seems to have gone up. This entire Planned Parenthood faux "sting" is like the crescendo. I worry if we reverse that course there may be consequences. Although of what scale I have no real idea.
Certainly the anti-abortion campaigners are anti-abortion.
But they are also strongly Puritan, authoritarian and anti-sex. Their morals aren't consequentialist in nature, they are deontologists.
Effectively, these come to anti-woman consequences but interpreting his as being anti-woman is at best not conducive to discussion and sensationalist and at worst is strawmanning, demonisation and obstructive othering.
The thing is, I don't believe there is anything unethical at all about aborting a pregnancy, viable or not.
Well, to play Devil's Advocate for a minute: There is something unethical with just killing someone because they're inconvenient. At a certain point a fetus becomes a human being, it's just a tough, medical question that isn't quite easy to answer. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, based on some criteria.
Most elective abortions happen when the "fetus" is nothing but a pool of snot.
Theres no more life there than in actual snot.
The point at which a fetus is viable outside the body is far, far away from the window where most abortions take place.
But hatch said "viable or not," which would tend to indicate more than that. ;p
Yeah I know, but the fact remains an overwhelming majority of abortions are at the pool of snot stage.
The few that happen past that are usually for medical reasons to save the mothers life in light of complications of some sort.