Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Not long ago, Planned Parenthood was using fuzzy math to insist that only three percent of their business comes from abortion – now they’re playing fast and loose with the facts again by claiming that women who live in 105 counties in the U.S. will have no access to the full range of contraceptive services if Planned Parenthood is defunded.
According to Vox.com, at last week’s Health Care Town Hall on CNN, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was asked by a member of the audience what he would do for the women who lived in 105 counties in the U.S. where Planned Parenthood is the only clinic that offers women the full range of contraceptive services.
Secretary Price responded, “Well, I’d be interested in the list you have.”
Naturally, the nation’s largest abortion provider was quick to respond and trotted out a list compiled by their pals at the Guttmacher Institute. Their research found that 3.1 million U.S. women who need publicly funded contraception live in counties with no publicly funded clinics that offer a full range of contraceptive methods, including long-acting methods like IUD’s.
This statistic only sounds ominous when it’s cited out of context. When the full picture is presented, it turns out these 105 counties represent just three percent of the total number of counties in the U.S.
What’s more, as LiveActionNews.com points out, many of those 105 counties still have providers that are just a few miles away in a neighboring county.
For example, the liberal media attacked House Speaker Paul Ryan on his plans to defund Planned Parenthood by claiming that by redirecting taxpayer funding to federally qualified health care centers he would be taking care away from women in his own district. When Ryan defended himself by saying these centers are located in “virtually every community providing the same kinds of services,” they came up with another carefully contrived distortion by claiming that 6,000 women have no one but Planned Parenthood to rely on for health care in Racine and Walworth counties – where nearly half of Ryan’s constituents live.
However, as LiveAction reports, a mere 10 miles from Racine, Wisconsin, is Kenosha, Wisconsin, where there are multiple community health care centers. And in Walworth County, which supposedly has no other clinics to service women’s needs, someone obviously didn’t do their homework. Mercy Hospital is located in Walworth County and runs a medical center that not only provides family planning and OB-GYN services for women, they also give discounts to the uninsured as well as offer some free services.
Oops!
But that’s not all. In the same town hall where the mainstream media claimed Secretary Price was “schooled” on women’s health care, he revealed plans to increase the number of community health centers and expanding services at others.
Once again, Planned Parenthood and its advocates are spinning the facts in order to foist their self-serving narrative onto the American public – that women will be left without adequate reproductive care without them – a claim they will never be able to substantiate because it simply isn’t true.
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