Defend Planned Parenthood!

For Free Abortion on Demand!

In the unending barrage of attacks on abortion rights, right-wing bigots are once again targeting Planned Parenthood, one of the leading providers of affordable contraception, abortion and women’s health care in the U.S. David Daleiden, of the grotesquely misnamed Center for Medical Progress, set up a phony biomedical research company and then made undercover videos of meetings with Planned Parenthood employees about the entirely legal procurement of fetal tissue donated for research by patients. Edited to the point of misrepresentation, these “sting” videos were seized upon by largely Republican Congressmen to propose cutting all federal funds to Planned Parenthood—and threatening to hold the federal budget hostage this fall if they don’t get what they want. Planned Parenthood receives more than $500 million—over 40 percent of its annual funding—from government sources, mostly Medicaid.

Not willing to wait, five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Utah—have already moved to cut funds for Planned Parenthood. The response of feminists and liberals has been defensive, with Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, apologizing for the “tone and statements” of the staff in one of the videos. On September 4, with the anti-abortion bigots emboldened by wide press coverage of the efforts to demonize the organization, an arson attack destroyed the Planned Parenthood clinic in Pullman, Washington.

The crusade against Planned Parenthood is an attack on the millions of women—many of them young, uninsured, poor and minority—who use its services. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2012 that 80 percent of Planned Parenthood patients had incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level. A September 1 article in the New York Times described what Planned Parenthood did last year in Louisiana: “administer nearly 20,000 tests for sexually transmitted infections, as well as provide gynecological exams, contraceptive care, cancer screenings and other wellness services for nearly 10,000 mostly low-income patients.”

In the face of the decades-long anti-abortion onslaught, the feminists’ strategy of lobbying, voting Democrat and delivering legal briefs before the Supreme Court has consistently ceded more ground to the forces of reaction. In the 1990s, groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) actively worked to demobilize clinic defense actions, preaching confidence in Bill Clinton. In office, Clinton viciously attacked black, poor and working-class women by slashing welfare and forcing recipients into low-wage, dead-end workfare jobs that did not pay enough to cover childcare. (read on)