A few thoughts on abortion, after another National Review opinion piece.
Although thousands of federally qualified health-care centers (FQHCs) across the country are able to provide women with numerous necessary services — many of them more essential than those offered by Planned Parenthood — ...
What exactly is essential and non-essential health care? Is this a comparison between an emergency room and a doctor's office?
... Richards maintained that FQHCs can’t handle the volume of patients currently served by Planned Parenthood and that women therefore will still lose health-care access if the organization is defunded. This is difficult to believe, given the 13,540 FQHCs and rural health-care clinics across the country, whereas Planned Parenthood operates a mere 665 facilities.
Planned Parenthood executives contend that low-income women in rural areas in particular will be harmed if the abortion group is defunded. But take, for example, the rural state of Nebraska, which has a total of two Planned Parenthood clinics and 167 FQHCs. How could it be possible that two Planned Parenthood clinics serve so many women that 167 healthcare centers would be overwhelmed by an overflow of patients? Meanwhile, even in California, the state with the most Planned Parenthood clinics by far, the abortion group has a mere 114 centers compared with 1,694 community health clinics.
This is a strange claim. For one thing, there are only 5 clinics that offer abortion services in Nebraska, not 167 (as of 2014, from report below). Two of those clinics are Planned Parenthood clinics. If both Planned Parenthood clinics were eliminated, that would leave three clinics offering abortion services for the entire state. Also note, 41% of women in Nebraska live in a county without abortion services available.
Here's a summary of states with fewer than 10 similar clinics:
Maine: 9 clinics offering abortion services, 1 of 4 Planned Parenthood clinics offer abortion services, 55% of women live in a county without a clinic that provices abortion services
Rhode Island: 5 clinics, 1 of 1 Planned Parenthood clinics, 36%
Vermont: 9 clinics, 5 of 12 Planned Parenthood clinics, 38%
Kansas: 4 clinics, 2 of 2 Planned Parenthood clinics, 56%
Missouri: 2 clinics, 1 of 12 Planned Parenthood clinics, 94%
North Dakota: 1 clinics, 2 of 10 Planned Parenthood clinics, 73%
South Dakota: 2 clinics, 1 of 1 Planned Parenthood clinics, 77%
Wisconsin: 7 clinics, 2 of 21 Planned Parenthood clinics, 67%
Alabama: 9 clinics, 2 of 2 Planned Parenthood clinics, 59%
Arkansas: 4 clinics, 2 of 2 Planned Parenthood clinics, 77%
Delaware: 6 clinics, 2 of 3 Planned Parenthood clinics, 18%
District of Columbia: 9 clinics, 5 of 10 Planned Parenthood clinics, 0%
Kentucky: 3 clinics, 0 of 2 Planned Parenthood clinics, 74%
Lousisiana: 5 clinics, 0 of 2 Planned Parenthood clinics, 63%
Mississippi: 2 clinics, 0 of 1 Planned Parenthood clinics, 91%
Oklahoma: 5 clinics, 1 of 6 Planned Parenthood clinics, 54%
South Carolina: 7 clinics, 1 of 2 Planned Parenthood clinics, 71%
West Vriginia: 5 clinics, 0 of 1 Planned Parenthood clinics, 90%
Alaska: 8 clinics, 4 of 4 Planned Parenthood clinics, 37%
Idaho: 5 clinics, 3 of 3 Planned Parenthood clinics, 68%
Montana: 5 clinics, 4 of 5 Planned Parenthood clinics, 55%
Utah: 6 clinics, 1 of 9 Planned Parenthood clinics, 62%
Wyoming: 3 clinics, 0 of 1 Planned Parenthood clinics, 96%
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1363/psrh.12015/epdf
Eliminating Planned Parenthood would leave exactly one clinic offering abortion services for the entire state of South Dakota, Montana, Missouri, and none in North Dakota. This would also increase the number of late term abortions (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780732), and as a Texas report on abortion self-induction states, "Most women would have preferred a clinical abortion but felt it was out of reach financially and logistically." (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/txpep/_files/pdf/TxPEP-Research-Brief-WomensExperiences.pdf)
With the above numbers in mind, two other excerpts:
For one thing, the group’s infamous assertion that abortion is a mere 3 percent of the services it provides has been debunked by left-leaning outlets such as Slate and the Washington Post, and the deception underlying that statistic was explained in depth by Rich Lowry in Politico in 2015.
A small note, but neither the Slate or Washington Post citations are given, and the "Politico" link is actually to The New York Post. The article referenced repeatedly states that 3% of the services performed are abortions.
If Planned Parenthood stopped performing abortions, few in either party would object to funding the organization; Republicans at every level support reimbursing FQHCs to provide necessary care that does not include abortions. If the group sees itself as invaluable to American women, it should cease providing abortions and focus all of its resources on truly essential health care. But it will never do that, because it is first and foremost an abortion corporation. That is where the bulk of its profit comes from.
The bulk of Planned Parenthood's profit comes from federal funding (matched partially by each state), which can't be used for abortions, so this claim is untrue. Additionally, a number of states don't even have a Planned Parenthood facility that can perform abortions (Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, Wyoming). Utah, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and North Dakota only have a small fraction of Planned Parenthood facilities offering abortion services. If abortion is such a high priority to Planned Parenthood then why are there so many clinics that don't offer that service?