Planned Parenthood has taken its fair share of hits over the years, and the last few months have been no exception. Bashing the reproductive rights organization is basically a Republican sport at this point, whether it’s edited tapes claiming to show the organization’s staffers illegally selling fetal tissue (they didn’t), sweeping lies told by presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina or the national embarrassment that was mostly-male legislators grilling organization president Cecile Richards while threatening to shutter the government earlier this week.
But here’s the thing: all of this time spent hating Planned Parenthood, the political power used to try to shut it down and activist energy trying to catch them a lie...it’s all for nothing. Planned Parenthood will continue to prevail as it always has. In fact, a recent poll shows that the organization is more popular than any presidential candidate or political party. Confounding as those numbers may be to Republicans, I suspect many women get it.
People don’t just like and support Planned Parenthood because one in three women have abortions and 95% don’t regret them, though that’s certainly part of it. People love Planned Parenthood because women (and men) across the country have gone there when they couldn’t go anywhere else. They’ve gotten STI tests, breast exams, pap smears, birth control – and yes, abortions. Planned Parenthood has helped them – saved them, even – and that’s something people don’t soon forget.
That’s why whenever Republicans make moves to defund the beloved organization, women have protested en masse. It’s why when breast cancer organization Susan G Komen for the Cure tried to take away $600,000 in grants from Planned Parenthood in 2012, they had to backtrack within days. Women were so furious – cutting up pictures of Komen’s pink ribbons, leaving thousands of posts on its Facebook wall and sending well over a million tweets – that Planned Parenthood raised over $3m in enraged donations.
As Richards told me over email, “Time and time again, when we’re attacked by extremists who are hell-bent on banning abortion and cutting women off from birth control, we seen an outpouring from what I call the great Planned Parenthood alumni association – women who have relied on us for healthcare, know exactly what we do and will fight for other women’s ability to get good care from us.”
And despite years-long campaigns to paint Planned Parenthood as evil – video “sting” operations that have failed again and again – the only thing that anti-choicers have been able to show is that the organization provides, well, abortions. And that’s really what this circus is all about.
The smears against Planned Parenthood aren’t about the organization doing anything illegal; every state that has ended an investigation into the organization has cleared the nonprofit of any wrongdoing. It’s about abortion, and some people’s opposition to it. But abortion is legal, and while people may fall on different sides of the fence on this issue, there’s no excuse for lying or politicians holding farcical, pointless hearings.
“The wild accusations from anti-abortion activists, members of Congress, Carly Fiorina and others just don’t resemble the real Planned Parenthood at all,” Richards says. “So we stay focused on our mission and on moving forward, whatever they try to throw at us.”
Luckily, the most Americans know what the real Planned Parenthood is. They’ve been there, they’re grateful for it, and they won’t stand by and watch anyone try to tear it down.
