When we examine the effects of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America on men and women in America, we find that the organization is an essential health-care provider to millions, which tells us that it would be harmful, not beneficial, for the organization to be defunded. To do this, we can first look at Planned Parenthood’s mission statement, followed by examples of states who currently have restrictive laws on such clinics, then, we can look at the social implications of defunding the organization, both in the short run and the long run. After examining this evidence, we can see why people have certain misconceptions about the organization and develop an action plan for how to educate people of the consequences of defunding Planned Parenthood.

In order to have an informed conversation about the federal funding of Planned Parenthood, we first have to establish what the Planned Parenthood organization is and what its goals are. According to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, “[they are] America’s most trusted health care provider” with “nearly 650 health centers […] that provide a wide range of safe, reliable healthcare.” (Planned Parenthood 2017). Planned Parenthood’s website also mentions that the majority of their services performed are preventative care services, ranging from contraceptives to tests and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases and infections to screenings for cancers such as cervical cancers. Another crucial aspect to Planned Parenthood, according to their official website, is their role in educating the community. They provide sex education that empowers young men and women to make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health. Planned Parenthood and their smaller branches have “[provided] educational programs and outreach to 1.5 million young people and adults every year.” (Planned Parenthood 2017). Another goal of Planned Parenthood is to be an advocate for laws and other policies that allow people around the country to have access to affordable reproductive health care. They created the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to “protect women’s health, educate teens and prevent unintended pregnancy [by] engaging in educational and electoral activity.” (Planned Parenthood 2017). This means that they lobby for change in congress to protect reproductive rights, organize protests that allow the public to participate in the cause, and creating local “grassroots” organizations to lobby locally for change. 

The majority of the funding for these goals previously mentioned comes from the federal government, in the form of Medicaid reimbursements, meaning that people with low incomes use their Medicaid insurance to pay for services performed by Planned Parenthood. Because if this, the low-income patient will get healthcare at low or no cost, then Planned Parenthood will submit a request to Medicaid for reimbursement, and the government will reimburse them the money for the services performed. The other way Planned Parenthood receives federal funding is through a government sponsored program called Title X, which is “the nations family planning program” whose funds “can only be used to support family planning healthcare.” (Planned Parenthood Action 2017). Many people may believe that the federal funding received by Planned Parenthood, or the Medicaid reimbursements, is used for controversial services such as abortion. Because of this, many people believe Planned Parenthood should not receive federal funding at all. This is not the case, however, because of the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment is an amendment put in place in 1976 that “[blocks] federal Medicaid funding for abortions services.” (Planned Parenthood Action 2017). Because of this, Planned Parenthood is no longer able to receive Medicaid reimbursements for abortion services performed. This seems like good news for taxpayers who do not believe that abortions are moral, however, most people are not aware of the fact that the Hyde Amendment exists, or even that Planned Parenthood is not allowed to use federal funding for abortions. Now that we have an understanding about what Planned Parenthood is and how it operates, we can look at the reasons people do not support its federal funding.

Many people do not think that Planned Parenthood is an organization whose services should be funded by Medicaid. Some of these people do not understand what Planned Parenthood does, and think that it is somewhat of a useless organization. Other people, who do not believe in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, disagree with the fact that many of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are equipped to perform abortion services. Others simply think that Planned Parenthood is “an independently wealthy entity” who does not need federal funding from Medicaid to continue its operation (Susan B. Anthony List). There is more to these arguments, however, than just these three reasons. The most glaring reason why people believe that Planned Parenthood should not be federally funded is because they perform abortions. Planned Parenthood is, by far, the largest provider of abortions in the United States. Because of this, people believe that, since Planned Parenthood performs so many abortions, that is where most of their revenue comes from . Another, less predominant argument is that Planned Parenthood uses hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in attempt to keep their federal funding. Although all of these arguments are important to discuss, I have focused my research on the arguments that Planned Parenthood is a useless organization and that Planned Parenthood is mainly used for abortions (Susan B. Anthony List).

One of the main reasons people argue that Planned Parenthood should be defunded is that Planned Parenthood’s main service is abortion. This argument is invalid because, according to Planned Parenthood’s website, only three percent of services performed at Planned Parenthood are abortion services. The website also states that eighty percent of their patients “receive services to prevent unintended pregnancy”, meaning that these serviced prevent women from becoming pregnant in the first place, eliminating their need to even have an abortion. Aside from contraceptives, “Planned Parenthood provides more than 270,000 Pap tests and more than 360,000 breast exams” a year, which detect cervical and breast cancer (Planned Parenthood 2017). If more women know they have these types of cancers, they will be able to get treatments which may save their lives. These tests are not the only tests Planned Parenthood performs that can save lives. Planned Parenthood also “provides more than 4.2 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections”, many of which may be deadly, “including 650,000 HIV tests” (Planned Parenthood 2017). According to the Center for Disease Control, over 1.2 million people in the United States are living with HIV, a disease which progresses to AIDS, the sixth deadliest disease in the United States (Center for Disease Control 2017). Without the HIV tests performed by Planned Parenthood, hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV would likely never get a diagnosis. Without a diagnosis, they would never get treatment for the disease and would likely suffer for a long time before contracting AIDS and passing away. In order to ensure that millions of people have access to these lifesaving tests and treatments, Planned Parenthood needs to remain in operation and needs to continue to receive government funding.

Consequences of losing access to the aforementioned crucial tests and treatments are not the only concerns to consider when looking at defunding Planned Parenthood. Another potentially deadly consequence of this is self-induced abortion. Self-induced abortions, or back-alley abortions, are performed by women on themselves, sometimes with dangerous chemicals, other times, with tools made of wires or coat hangers. These self-induced abortions were extremely common before clinical abortions were made legal. These “procedures” are exceedingly dangerous and have led to complications such as sepsis or even, in extreme cases, death. In her research paper about back-alley abortions, Teresa Salutes, a professor at UC Irvine Health School of Medicine, cites an instance of a “24-year-old female with 21-week twin gestation who presented to the emergency department with […] sepsis, chorioamnionitis, fetal demise, and total abdominal hysterectomy.” (Salutes 1). She goes on to explain that these complications were a result of the woman performing a self-induced abortion. She also mentions that this unsafe procedure was a result of the woman feeling like she had no other option. Whether this was the result of limited access to a clinic or limited knowledge of the resources available to her is unclear. However, according to the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, the majority of women attempting self-induced abortions are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four years old (Coles et. al. 2). This is likely due to the fact that these women do not know about the resources available to them, or that their nearest clinic is too far away and they have no way to get to it. If Planned Parenthood were to be defunded, millions of women would lose access to medically safe abortions. If millions of women lose this access, they 
would have to resort to these unsafe abortions, which would lead to more medical complications and more deaths due to unintended pregnancy.

These medical consequences previously mentioned are not the only types of consequences involved in the defunding of Planned Parenthood. If this crucial organization were to be defunded, many social consequences would arise as well. To cite an example of what would happen if millions of women lost access to affordable birth control, we can look at countries where women do not have access to birth control at all. Third world countries such as India, are an example of this. India is extremely overpopulated, it is currently home to 1.34 billion people, most of which live in extreme poverty. Its population is growing so fast, the economy can barely keep up with it. This is because women do not have access to contraceptives. Their culture does not allow them to use birth control, because if this “Indians are aware of the need for birth control, but too many remain ignorant of contraceptive methods or are unwilling to discuss them.” (Pitts  2013). This lack of availability of birth control methods comes from the aspect of their culture that says boys are superior to girls, and you need to have a son to carry on your name. For this reason, couples will have multiple daughters in hopes of having a son. Although this is not part of our culture in America, we can learn a lesson from this. Indians do not have access to birth control because they want to have lots of kids, which leads to overpopulation. If the women in the United States lose access to affordable birth control because of Planned Parenthood being defunded, we, too, could end up like India, with overpopulation and millions of people in poverty.

To bring the previous argument a little closer to home, we can look at another real-life example of what would happen if Planned Parenthood were to be defunded. To do this, we can look at the state of Texas, who currently has multiple restrictive laws that prevent women from having easy access to the vital healthcare services that Planned Parenthood provides. In 2013, the state of Texas implemented Health Bill 2, which was a law created with the intentions of making it more difficult to access abortions services in the state. Because of this, many women no longer have access to reproductive healthcare, which has caused them to take extreme measure for the healthcare they need. These measures include having to travel extreme lengths to find a clinic that performs abortions (Gerdts 1). If women have to take such extreme measures to find a place that performs medically safe abortions, they will be more likely to perform unsafe abortions either by themselves or by an unlicensed abortion provider. Neither of these options are safe and have caused many casualties, including death, in recent years. In her book documenting many personal stories of women’s experiences with Planned Parenthood, Gloria Feldt mentions that “many people in the U.S. and abroad lack access to the most basic reproductive health care.” (Feldt 17). She gives an example of this by mentioning one woman who was forced to travel three hours, across state lines, to access a facility that would provide an abortion (Feldt 142). These are only a few examples of women who have had to take extreme measures in search of the healthcare they so desperately need. If horrible things like this happen in the state of Texas after these restrictive laws were put in place, the same thing could happen country-wide if Planned Parenthood clinics were made more difficult to access in the future. 

Now that we have talked about the reasons Planned Parenthood should not be defunded, we need to talk about what we need to do to ensure we continue to make progress about the topic and have productive discussions surrounding it. The main reason people are reluctant to accept Planned Parenthood as a beneficial organization is because they are not aware of the facts I have discovered through my research and talked about in this essay. People who argue that Planned Parenthood’s main profit comes from abortion do so because they do not know that only three percent of their services performed are abortions. In order to inform people about the real facts, not just “facts” based on biased opinions, we need to be able to have civilized, informed discussions that involve all of Planned Parenthood’s services, not just the “pro-life” versus “pro-choice” argument that continues to surround the organization. Aspen Baker discusses this in her TED Talk about “A Better Way to Talk About Abortion”. In this TED Talk she mentions that we need to stop classifying people into these two “pro-life” and “pro-choice” categories and instead classify people as “pro-voice”. She defines “pro-voice” as listening and discussing to understand instead of just to argue and encourages people to do this because it will include everyone’s perspectives. When we include everyone’s perspectives when having this kind of discussion, we are able to move past just the polarizing arguments, and come to a compromise that makes everyone happy (Baker 3:45). Not only do we need to have civilized, inclusive discussions about Planned Parenthood, we need to make sure teens and young adults are aware of the services the organization provides to them. If we educate our youth about these facts I have mentioned in this essay, they too will be able to make their own educated decisions about their stance on the organization. This will also allow them to make use of the services provided by Planned Parenthood without feeling ashamed, guilty, or alone in the decisions they make. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to teach about it in schools during sexual education courses. If we do not make an effort to begin this type of discussion, we will be stuck in this same endless cycle forever, where everyone is always arguing with each other and never coming to a complete decision or agreement about anything surrounding this controversy.

As presented in the research above, Planned Parenthood is a beneficial organization that should not be defunded despite the prevalent claims that its main profit comes from abortion services. Planned Parenthood provides much more than abortion services. Services such as screenings for sexually transmitted disease and certain types of cancers are essential to the millions of people that visit Planned Parenthood clinics each year. Defunding the organization would leave these millions of people without the critical healthcare they desperately need. Planned Parenthood is not just essential for healthcare, but for our population as well, demonstrated by examples such as Texas and India where Planned Parenthood facilities are scarce, or none-existent. After examining the effects of Planned Parenthood on millions of people across America, we find that it would be extremely harmful for society as a whole to defund the organization.
