A shot in the foot

In a dismally familiar move, a Republican senator is doing his darnedest to ensure that more women have abortions – which is funny, considering being pro-life is practically a requirement for any Republican politician.

Yet Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana is one of many Republican senators bent on making abortions as numerous and unsafe as possible. In his latest piece of legislation, a proposed amendment to the Appropriations Act, Vitter asks that Congress prohibit federal Title X funding from being given to Planned Parenthood.

Title X is dedicated to providing reproductive health care services to those who cannot afford them. Millions of women in this country currently cannot afford reproductive health care, and in the current economic crisis that number is likely to rise.

So the last thing – the absolute last thing – these women need is for their access to care to be revoked. First of all, Planned Parenthood is not merely an abortion factory, despite what pro-lifers might have you believe. 

Centers across the country care for more than 5 million low-income women (myself included), providing services ranging from contraception and family planning to STI prevention and breast and cervical cancer detection.

It is scathingly ironic that a senator who devotes an entire section on his Web site to “Women and Families” would work so hard to do what’s worst for women and families (because heaven knows families are the sole domain of women).

Without access to reproductive care, women have a higher risk of STIs and unplanned pregnancies. Without control over the size of their families, women cannot be equal competitors in the work force and are far likelier to have more children than they can afford to raise. Any politician who feels fine about putting millions of women at risk to easily preventable STIs deserves a call from the Center for Disease Control.

While I’m as staunchly pro-choice as they come, I can understand a pro-life person’s sadness at having federal funding given to abortion providers (even though federal funding cannot be used for abortions themselves).

I do get it: I’m pretty sad that my tax dollars are being used to fund wars.

But the fact is, desperate women will have abortions, whether or not they are legal. If safe and legal means are taken away, women will turn to unsafe and illegal methods.
What enrages me about senators like Vitter is not that they are pro-life. If you believe life begins at conception and abortion is murder, nothing I can say to you will change your mind. But organizations like Planned Parenthood are trying to prevent unintended pregnancies from happening in the first place.

Nobody likes abortion. Truly, nobody does. Democrats are the ones fighting for comprehensive sex education and access to contraception, which have been proven to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies.

The only thing conservatives can come up with is “Don’t have sex.”

Fine. You go first.