3 percent isn't enough to criminalize Planned Parenthood

IU students are used to avoiding plenty of people they see on campus.

We steer clear of exes, old roommates, sorority girls with buckets for donations, Green Peace, etc. The list goes on and on.

But there are two types of people you want to adamantly evade above all others.

They’re the ones who pass out Bibles and the ones who hand you inflammatory pamphlets about abortion and Planned Parenthood.

The latter group of people visited our campus this week, and I’m all riled up.

Anti-Planned Parenthood advocates handed out propaganda that insinuated that Planned Parenthood admits its abortion services are “murdering” unborn children.
Regardless of how you view the abortion debate, only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are related to abortion.

This is not enough to prosecute an institution founded and funded to provide affordable health care not only to women, but to men as well.

Five million people will annually visit one of the nearly 750 Planned Parenthood health centers across the nation. That includes women and men of all ages.

Planned Parenthood will perform more than half a million Pap tests and breast exams every year — two critical services needed to monitor women’s health and screen for cancer.

Planned Parenthood will administer more than four million tests and treatment services for sexually transmitted infections each year.

That’s a service with no gender wall. Planned Parenthood can test or treat you for an STI regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman.

And people have the audacity to criminalize Planned Parenthood for performing abortions, a medical procedure that has been federally legal in this country for nearly 40 years.

Now, this is a country where free speech is celebrated and encouraged.

As IU is a public institution on public property, anyone is welcome to come and attempt to pitch ideas to us.

But it becomes a whole different ballgame when those people involve
minors.

More than half of the people I encountered handing out the anti-Planned Parenthood propaganda were young teenagers who couldn’t have been older than 15 or 16.

I realize teenagers have opinions. I certainly did at that age.

But letting adolescents hand out pamphlets with pictures of partially aborted fetuses and holding up posters of inflammatory images to make their point is borderline lunacy.

Don’t involve kids in your battle. It’s not their fight.

The abortion debate isn’t going to go away.

But neither is Planned Parenthood, no matter how hard some states try and defund the positive work the health centers provide.

So, the haters can bring on all the rabble-rousing and uninformed propaganda they want.

Planned Parenthood and all its wonderful health services are here to stay.

­— wdmcdona@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Dane McDonald on Twitter @W_DaneMcDonald.