An Animated History of Planned Parenthood, Brought to You by Lena Dunham, JJ Abrams & More

It is about time that self-right­eous men and cler­gy stop bul­ly­ing women.

The arti­cle lost me at ‘Lena Dun­ham.’ The birth con­trol ser­vices PP offers are fine, but the sin­gle-issue plat­form of abor­tion-on-demand by mod­ern ‘fem­i­nists’ is not. There is a large vari­ety of birth con­trol con­ve­nient­ly avail­able to women in Amer­i­ca, as well as edu­ca­tion­al resources. Fem­i­nists only like abor­tion because it gives women a con­se­quence-free-out from their bad life-choic­es. Want to be a good fem­i­nist? Do so by being a good gate­keep­er with a mature sense of per­son­al account­abil­i­ty over who you decide to let in and vis­it your womb. A child (it’ll grow into noth­ing else) should not have to die because it’s moth­er could­n’t keep her legs shut, and had regrets the morn­ing after. The abor­tion indus­try insults women by assum­ing they have no self-con­trol, and thus they believe laws should be in place to pro­tect them FOR them. Guys, wear a con­dom, you’re 50% of the choice (no mat­ter what the fem­i­nazis think)!

Wow, noth­ing like a Planned Par­ent­hood video to bring out the hate­ful com­menters. Did any of the com­menters here watch the video? It address­es Sanger’s sup­port of eugen­ics, but also notes that Planned Par­ent­hood as an orga­ni­za­tion has changed––it’s called not throw­ing the baby out with the bath water. The U.S. rose to promi­nence through the mas­sacre of Native Amer­i­cans and the enslave­ment of African Americans––truly a human tragedy of incred­i­ble scope––but who here argues that this dark ori­gin makes the coun­try as it exists today ille­git­i­mate? At least be hon­est in why you are against Planned Par­ent­hood, instead of pre­tend­ing it’s because of a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure you found out about because you already want­ed to attack Planned Par­ent­hood before you knew any­thing about its his­to­ry. Giv­en that no one at Planned Par­ent­hood today pro­fess­es to be a eugeni­cist, this argu­ment is a very weak one.

Bill W. and Randy are admirably hon­est. Bill seems most con­cerned to ensure that women bear the unequal bur­den of their mis­for­tune by being pun­ished with moth­er­hood (men are fine though, their mis­takes do not require con­se­quences because…?), while Randy is most con­cerned that men suf­fer inequal­i­ty when women can choose to get abor­tions and men can’t. So let me get this straight: wom­en’s unequal respon­si­bil­i­ty for unplanned preg­nan­cy is equi­table and fine, but the fact that men don’t get to decide about anoth­er per­son­’s abor­tion is intol­er­a­bly unjust. It’s only a fair sys­tem when women have no or lim­it­ed access to abor­tion because: women are the ones who are suf­fer­ing, and men get to have their equal say in some­thing that affects them far less! This dou­ble bur­den on women = okie dok­ie for you guys; I guess two wrongs do make a right. My point is: ban­ning abor­tion is not “neu­tral,” because men don’t get preg­nant, men don’t give birth, and men are not expect­ed to do the major­i­ty of child-rear­ing duties. Some of these are brute bio­log­i­cal real­i­ties. But giv­en these real­i­ties we don’t say “well, nature sure screwed you! Oh well!” We try to take into account those real­i­ties and cre­ate as fair a sys­tem as we can with the lop­sided sit­u­a­tion we are giv­en: that’s called jus­tice.

In all seri­ous­ness, for Randy and those who con­sid­er the fetus a full-fledged human with a right to life, I rec­om­mend read­ing Judith Jarvis Thomp­son’s defense of abor­tion, which grants that even if the fetus is a per­son with a right to life, abor­tion is still moral­ly jus­ti­fied: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/A_Defense_of_Abortion