theatlantic | Following the release a series of pro-life sting videos targeting Planned Parenthood, Republican senators are threatening to defund the family-planning provider. A vote on their bill to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding—which accounts for 40 percent of the organization’s budget—could come as early as Monday.
On Twitter, pro-life advocates are trying to help it along,
popularizing the hashtag #UnplannedParenthood on Wednesday. Many of the
tweets come from people who purport to have been, or have had,
accidental children.
In some ways, reading through the
missives is sort of an upper—a testament to how difficult and unexpected
things often work out well in the end.
But probe even slightly further, and the movement becomes disastrously illogical.
First, there is a big difference between an unplanned pregnancy and
an unwanted one—and an even bigger gulf between a baby you actively
choose to have and one you’re forced to carry because abortion is
illegal.
Twitter hashtags aren’t exactly doctoral dissertations. Still, it’s
odd how this one seems to celebrate unplanned pregnancy. Let’s recall
that women have been desperate for effective birth control for
centuries. During the Great Depression, women who wanted to avoid having
babies they couldn’t afford used “disinfectant douches” that burned their genitals and didn’t do much to stop conception. The invention of the pill is partly credited with helping women expand their earning potential and achieve greater gender equality.
Today, reducing unexpected pregnancies is widely considered to be a major public-health imperative. The work of Isabel Sawhill
and others has shown that high rates of unplanned births, particularly
among poor and unwed mothers, contribute to poverty. When women are offered
long-acting reversible contraceptives, like IUDs and implants, they
overwhelmingly choose to get them inserted—and both unplanned births and
abortions decrease as a result.
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