Why has this turned into “defend Planned Parenthood”??
To be simultaneously pro-life and anti-Planned Parenthood is a contradiction.
The underlying argument against Planned Parenthood typically seen from pro-life supporters is that they contribute to the abortion rate. That argument is an exercise in bad arithmetic. As above, if at minimum two out of three clients are there for birth control, the net is negative.
Of the dozen or more times I’ve visited one of their clinics with girlfriends when I was younger and later with nieces or friends of those nieces, not once was it in search of an abortion. Because birth control works. And because they were there because they’d made the choice to plan when to become parents.
I don’t rely on my own experience, and freely acknowledge the actual proportion of birth control clients is not trivial to calculate. It’s certainly not 97 percent, as some of their figures suggest, accurately perhaps but certainly misleadingly, but neither is it less than two out of three, with the immediate corollary that Planned Parenthood, by the measure of reduced pregnancies, is pro-life.
As a math professor, arithmetic is a subconscious process for me. Bad arithmetic stands out, gratingly, like nails across a chalkboard, something that needs to stop before a meaningful conversation can occur.
For Catholics, there is a nuanced argument available against Planned Parenthood. They depress the abortion rate, a positive outcome, by promoting contraception, a negative means, for Catholics,
or some proportion of Catholics at any rate.
Jones noted that there has long been data showing that Catholic women are avid users of artificial contraception.
The first NSFG survey, which in 1973 was administered only to married women, shows that 66.4 percent of all married Catholic women of child-bearing age at the time used contraception. (Table 17). Among those using birth control, only 8.3 percent relied on rhythm; 2.9 percent relied on withdrawal. (Table 18).
But the argument that the use of contraception negates the value of depressing abortion rates is not the argument I see in these discussions.
What I see is bad arithmetic.
And bad facts, and blood libels, and genetic fallacies, and an insistence that nuance is antithetical to religious tradents who boast, quite rightly, of millennia of devotion to church doctors who would be as adamantly opposed as myself to arguments from bad arithmetic.
Which makes for a fitting closing argument to this thread and this election.
Pro-life Catholics should vote for Joe Biden, and against Donald Trump, because only one of these candidates supports Planned Parenthood.
Do the math.
