Pro-life Fundamentalism

I attended a private Christian school from pre-school all the way through my undergrad college. Even though Mount Union is pretty much Methodist in name only, my grade school and high school were very religious and leaned to the right. Apart from teaching me that dinosaur extinction was caused by relocation stress when they exited Noah's Ark, they made concerted efforts to denounce Planned Parenthood and portray the organization as a baby-killing factory. Even today, go into almost any church and tell a member or the pastor you work for Planned Parenthood and they won't be very friendly. If that isn't enough, pro-life supporters are now requesting that government funding be revoked from Planned Parenthood in order to fight against abortion.

Doesn't this seem like spending a dollar to make a nickel? Planned Parenthood doesn't just perform abortions. The majority of their work is aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies, and women's health issues (mammograms, pap smears etc...). Only 2-3% of Planned Parenthood's services are abortions. Thus, in practice, Planned Parenthood has the very real effect of reducing abortions. Instead of being content with that, these irrational pro-life zealots (just to be clear, there are rational pro-lifers) completely ignore these facts and insist that we only focus on abstinence only based education, which in the aggregate produces more abortions!!

Today in Slate, Will Saletan gives the Pro-life case for Planned Parenthood. Preview:

I'll say that again: If you define pro-life as preventing abortions, Planned
Parenthood is the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world. No, it doesn't give teenagers the idea of having sex. That idea comes to them quite naturally, thank you very much. What Planned Parenthood does, more comprehensively than anyone else, is to distribute the means and knowledge to control your risk of getting pregnant when you don't want to be pregnant. And those two things, combined with pressure to exercise that control assiduously, are the surest way to prevent abortions. If you wait till women are already unhappily pregnant, you're too late.

Last week I didn't understand the logic behind the outrage on the far-right when Planned Parenthood decided to accept gift cards. The method of payment wasn't likely to increase the number of abortions. In all likelihood, the gift cards would probably have the effect of preventing abortions by allowing the poor to have better access to contraceptives. However, now I get it. It seems that it was just another occasion for manufactured and uninformed outrage against Planned Parenthood.