When Colleen Luther was 27 and between jobs, she found a lump in her breast. She called various doctors, but most wouldn’t take an uninsured patient; the ones who would didn’t have appointments for several weeks, and Luther was looking at paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket. Young and with no history of breast cancer in her family, Luther figured seeing a doctor probably wasn’t urgent.
“I was about to just drop it and be like, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ and move on,” she said. “Then I remembered Planned Parenthood.”
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A few of her friends had gone to Planned Parenthood for birth control, and Luther recalled that the clinics used a sliding scale. They were able to get her in right away, and confirmed that she did have a lump. After monitoring it through one menstrual cycle, they sent Luther for a mammogram and then an ultrasound and biopsy. Her breast exam and the related diagnostic tests were free. But they came back with a diagnosis of stage 2 breast cancer.
Luther moved back home with her family in New York and underwent treatment. Twelve years later, she’s still in remission and is a married mother of a 2-year-old girl. Still grateful for the care she received at Planned Parenthood, Luther makes herself available to speak to journalists about her story.
Without that Planned Parenthood checkup, Luther says, “I think it’s a very real possibility that my prognosis would not have been as good as it was. I may not be here. My daughter may not be here.”
Today, the U.S. Senate is debating cutting funding to Planned Parenthood. The battle is ostensibly over abortion, after an anti-abortion activist secretly recorded Planned Parenthood officials discussing the donation of fetal tissue for medical research. While there is no evidence that Planned Parenthood broke any laws and while fetal tissue research is both legal and valuable, the conversations captured on video are graphic, and the anti-abortion right is enraged. Now Senate Republicans are trying to cut off more than $500 million in federal funds to Planned Parenthood.
“I think most Americans don’t want their tax dollars going to this,” presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a co-sponsor of the bill to defund Planned Parenthood, told CNN. “When something is so morally repugnant to so many people, why should tax dollars go to this?”
Just one problem: This isn’t about fetal tissue or even abortion at all.
Not a single dollar of federal money pays for elective abortions at Planned Parenthood (or anywhere else). While Planned Parenthood does provide abortion services at some of its clinics (again, never paid for with federal dollars), more than 90 percent of the services the organization renders are things like Pap smears, birth control prescriptions, breast exams, sexual health education, and treatment and testing for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Across the United States, 2.7 million patients visit a Planned Parenthood clinic every year. One in five American women has gone to Planned Parenthood for health care (this writer included). Unsurprisingly, a 2012 poll showed that Americans overwhelmingly oppose defunding Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood also serves some of the poorest and most vulnerable women in America. The majority of their federal funding comes in the form of Medicaid reimbursements, and nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood patients live on incomes 150 percent below the federal poverty line. About half of Planned Parenthood’s patients receive care through funding under Title X, the federal program dedicated to funding family planning — and that, again, does not fund elective abortion services.
When it comes to funding Planned Parenthood and family planning services generally, the government gets a lot of bang for its buck. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that publicly funded family planning services prevented some 2 million unplanned pregnancies in 2013, 693,000 of which would have ended in abortion. The best way to lower the unplanned pregnancy rate, and by extension the abortion rate, is to fund contraception and the other services Planned Parenthood provides. It’s about the most fiscally conservative policy around: For every one dollar invested in Title X family planning funds, the government saves $7. And that funding is pro-life in every sense of the word: Not only do Title X funds prevent abortions, but they also fund cervical cancer screenings, saving the lives of more than a thousand women every year.
Despite the fact that Planned Parenthood saves lives and protects the health of millions of women, anti-abortion Republicans use Orwellian language to justify choking off funding to the group. According to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “Senators can either vote to protect women’s health or they can vote to protect subsidies for a political group mired in scandal.”
It’s unclear how cutting off women’s access to health care is in any universe a “vote to protect women’s health.” And the same Republican Party that is now trying to cut funds to Planned Parenthood tried to wipe out Title X just a month ago.
So why do supposedly anti-abortion, fiscally conservative Republicans want to cut funds that prevent abortions and defund an organization that saves the government money?
Perhaps because this isn’t about abortion but about hostility to women having sex. That’s the truth: Planned Parenthood offers shame-free health care, including for women and men who are sexually active, and helps them to have healthy and happy sex lives without having children until they’re ready and they want to (hence the name “Planned Parenthood”). Senate Republicans seem to believe it’s more “moral” to shame sexually active women than it is to prevent millions of unplanned pregnancies, hundreds of thousands of abortions, tens of thousands of sexually transmitted infections, and thousands of cancer deaths every year.
We know what happens when you defund Planned Parenthood, because we’ve seen it in Texas. The result? More than half of women now experience at least one barrier to reproductive health care in that state. Some 30,000 Texas women vanished from the ranks of those receiving government-funded family planning services. Planned Parenthood clinics shuttered, and the largest drops in the number of Texas women receiving state family planning services occurred in the same places where those clinics closed down. Health care providers in the state made 63,581 fewer claims for birth control than they did when Planned Parenthood was a provider receiving state funds. Without access to contraception and with limited access to safe abortion, some of the state’s poorest women are even turning to illegal and unsafe abortion methods when they get pregnant.
In other words, cutting funding from Planned Parenthood doesn’t mean that women will simply go to other clinics. It means tens of thousands will lose their health care provider. There is already a shortage of Medicaid providers serving low-income women, and many states, especially in the South, refused the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act — meaning that women there who can’t get Medicaid but also can’t afford to purchase health insurance on the exchanges end up in a coverage gap. They often rely on sliding-scale Planned Parenthood clinics for their care. And Planned Parenthood serves a lot of women: While they receive just over 10 percent of Title X federal family planning dollars, Planned Parenthood clinics serve 37 percent of women who rely on Title X funding for their health care. Other federally qualified health centers getting the same percentage of funding serve just 9 percent of family planning patients under Title X — this means Planned Parenthood serves four times as many women as comparably funded health centers.
Defund Planned Parenthood, and thousands and thousands of women will slip through the health system cracks, which means untreated infections, cancers that don’t get caught quickly enough, pregnancies women don’t want or can’t afford, abortions that could have been prevented, and HIV infections that may have been averted.
Colleen Luther says she’s saddened by the debates to defund the organization — especially when she thinks of her daughter, now just a toddler, growing up and needing the kind of care Planned Parenthood provides.
“I’d tell her that I hope you can feel comfortable talking to me and your father about these things, but if you don’t, or you have friends that can’t talk to their parents, you should know and they should know that these options are available to you,” Luther said, choking up. “It’s your body. That’s what liberty is.”
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