Defunding Planned Parenthood

Since August, that long hot month of bad movies premised on worse ideas,  I have been busy.

Doing what? you ask.

Thinking, say I:  a good and worthy pursuit requiring no further explanation. I would be a contemplative, in fact, if I had the time;  as it is, thinking is an engrossing hobby, and I do it every chance I get.

Right now I am thinking about the measure to defund Planned Parenthood, which has passed the House, will probably not pass the Senate, and meanwhile is inviting a lot of lively conversation of the hypothetical genre. What if the federal government actually stopped giving Planned Parenthood $363 million dollars annually?

Well, what if?

According to one narrative, defunding Planned Parenthood means yanking, instantaneously, an entire range of presumably irreplaceable health care out from under the feet of poor women:  pap smears, mammograms, and the like. It means, in other words, that what pro-choicers have always suspected about pro-lifers is true:  they love the unborn baby, not born baby or the baby mama. They also love rich people and Wal-Mart and white shoes and stock-car racing and skeet shooting and feeling good about not feeling other people's pain. But of course everyone knew that already.

Now, as we've all read, our federal tax dollars even now don't actually fund the abortions provided by Planned Parenthood. What we've been paying for, and what the big bad ugly pro-life movement now wants to eliminate are . . . but of course . . . pap smears and mammograms for poor women (see above), which . . . but of course  . . .  nobody in America provides except Planned Parenthood.

Which is why we fund them, to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, and not, say, faith-based systems of medical clinics in low-income neighborhoods, which provide all the services Planned Parenthood provides and more, to the exact same demographic -- except abortion. Because we want fewer abortions, really we do, and honestly, it's all about the pap smears.  Which is why it's so important to keep funding Planned Parenthood.

Now that I've stepped outside into the cold night air and drawn several long cleansing breaths, let's ponder this line of what I guess we'll have to call reasoning.

First of all, of course it's not true that low-income women have no access to reproductive medical care save through Planned Parenthood. The lowest-income sectors qualify for Medicaid, which provides comprehensive health care at no cost. That, statistically speaking, the worst infant and maternal outcomes occur at this socio-economic level is not due to non-access to health care, at least in the sense that health care is not accessible. This is the demographic least likely to seek access to health care of any kind until a problem has become an emergency;  this is the demographic most likely in the first place to live in circumstances which have a negative impact on overall health.

Still and all, poor though she may be, a woman who can get herself, or be brought, to Planned Parenthood can also get herself, or be brought, to a doctor providing care to Medicaid patients -- unless what she really wants, or what the person bringing her really wants, is not health care but an abortion.

Second, it's untrue that member of the pro-life movement value only embryonic life and want to turn mothers and children into the streets to lick motor oil off the surfaces of puddles for their sustenance. What members of the pro-life movement would like to see happen is the cessation of what amounts to a massive federally-funded reward to Planned Parenthood. If as a society we do actually want what even the pro-choice side says it wants -- a reduction in the number of abortions performed in this country -- then we have to stop offering financial incentives to an organization which performs abortions, and offer them instead to organizations providing care without the killing. They're out there;  we simply don't hear so much about them, because the PP monster is standing in the way.

Nobody in the pro-life movement is proposing that we pull the rug out from under what we might call "woman-specific health care," if what we mean by "health care" are services other than, and excluding, abortion.  There are, after all, myriad organizations which offer medical care and other resources to pregnant women and their children, without  providing abortion. Why should we not support their expansion? Why shouldn't a pro-life system of medical clinics be able to grow to the size of Planned Parenthood? Why, come to think of it, should a business like Planned Parenthood receive financial incentives, while propagandizing against the work of crisis pregnancy centers offering support and resources to pregnant women and their (living) babies? Why should we be paying this bully?

The real issue is not women's healthcare vs. no women's health care. It's why, if what we care about is health care -- you know, the pap smears and so forth -- our federal tax dollars are supporting the domination in the health-care arena of an organization whose primary activity is abortion.

Yes, the pro-life movement wants health care for women. Yes, the pro-life movement wants all mothers and children to have access to resources which enable their flourishing.

What the pro-life movement opposes is the idea that abortion is simply the price of doing the poor-women's-health-care business. If Planned Parenthood wanted to get out of the abortion business, that would change the landscape completely, with regard to funding. As a parent, I don't like their sex-education model;  I don't think my kindergarten child needs to know that everyone she knows is a sexual being. I am also not myself a believer in the benefits of artificial birth control. But I could live with Planned Parenthood's offering these services. I could live with the knowledge that -- as now -- my tax dollars were funding the provision of these services. The knowledge that my funding of these services keeps the abortion ship afloat? That there is the deal-breaker.

Reproductive Technology and Waiting for the Punch Line

It's a sign of the late-August dog days, I guess, that the big news is a box-office flop:  the Jennifer Aniston artificial-insemination vehicle The Switch.

Do I mean that this movie is a vehicle for the glisteny Jennifer Aniston, who has never quite moved beyond either "that girl that played on Friends," or that girl who, every single week of the world, on the covers of every single tabloid in the grocery-store checkout line, is just about to steal Brad Pitt back from the chick with the sultry lips? Or do I mean that it's a vehicle for the idea of artificial insemination, a signal that if we think there's anything wrong with that, we're the ones who are out of the mainstream? 

I'm really not sure.

Over at the Washington Post,  Danielle Bean is talking about it, taking on the movie's premise with regard to its assumptions about family. The movie assumes, in Aniston's words, that

it isn't necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children and a dog named Spot . . . Love is love and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere. That is what I love about this movie. It is saying it is not the traditional sort of stereotype of what we have been taught as a society of what family is.

Bean takes issue, rightly, with the notion of having a child because you want to have a child, but do not necessarily want, or have convinced yourself that you don't need, a family. If you don't want or need a family, at least in any traditional sense, then neither does your child;  so apparently goes a thought process which, to judge from most of the comments appended to Bean's article, is gaining cultural ascendancy about as fast as the sun rises in the morning. Or to put it another way, it would seem that what Bean stands for -- a family with a mother and a father, a family which accepts children as gifts rather than making them as do-it-yourself home-improvement projects -- is the sinking of the sun behind a stand of black mountains. At least, the cultural clock points to that, though of course we've all known clocks to be wrong.

Meanwhile, at First Things,  Mary Rose Somarriba takes up the question of why, exactly, the artificial construction of a child is a joke with any number of unfunny punchlines.

What’s sad is that some real, deep aspects of the human experience—such as the realization of one’s aging, the desire for love and family, and the sorrow of lost time—are covered up with chipper confidence that none of these things matter anymore. Age doesn’t matter. Time is never lost.

Love and commitment aren’t necessary; in fact, they’re not even worth seeking. You can start a family all on your own. It’s a Do-It-Yourself Family! The biological bond required to conceive a child—a male’s sperm and a female’s egg—is all you need; you don’t need the metaphysical and the personal bond with another to make a family.

Surely they value love and commitment; they want love and commitment to be an essential part of their relationship with their children, don’t they? Nobody doubts it. But how does one expect these to translate into relationships with their kids if the parent doesn’t value love and commitment in their own lives to start with? It’s one of those questions that isn’t asked and is laughed off.

Again, the comments are illuminating. This being First Things and not the WaPo, most readers are on board with Somarriba's objections to the movie's attempts to jokify, rather than ponder, a set of imponderables about the value of human life and what causes that life to be valuable. Still, there are the people who don't get it. A reader named BillyG, for example, says he "knows" some children born via reproductive technology, and they're all fine. One of them even just went to college. So, wow. Ends, meet means. Shake hands. Make happy happy. The end.

Only of course it's not that simple. Now, regarding children born of reproductive technology -- your AI babies, your IVF babies -- I don't think that any reasonable person would suggest that these people should not have been born. That's where the argument always goes, right? You don't like IVF? Well, meet my lovely daughter and tell her to her face she shouldn't exist.

But that is where the argument shouldn't go, because it's not the point at all. The point is not that a person's origins make him bad, but that the fact of his goodness does not make his mode of origin right, if it isn't.

Consider this:  let's say that I have a child conceived out of wedlock. Let's say that this child is the consequence of my affair with a married man.

Let's say, also, that she is a bright, beautiful, talented child, the joy of my life. Let's say, though it should be so obvious that we shouldn't have to say it, that God loves her, too.

So, how she got here doesn't matter, right? The point is that she is here.

Well, yes and no. Yes, she's here (hypothetically, at any rate), and this is an objective good. But what is also objectively true is that she got here by means which were frankly destructive.

If I have slept with a married man, I have effected the violation of that man's marriage vows and the betrayal of his wife and existing children. With him, I have brought into being a child who -- despite the objective and utter goodness of her life -- stands as a marker to half her family of her father's betrayal. Perhaps one of her grandmothers refuses to acknowledge her, and her half-siblings are not allowed to know of her existence. Maybe she doesn't know about them, either, but I do. And when she wants to know where her father is, I have to say . . .  something.

Or maybe her father's with us. Let's say he ditched the first wife and kids and married me. Fine, my kid has a dad at home with her, but then the kids from the first marriage don't. So she knows he has this other family, and the half-siblings maybe spend weekends with us, or the summer, and eventually my kid is old enough to do math, and to work out the months between our wedding and her birth, and to put together a picture of her father's behavior to the women in his life which is less than heroic, let's say.

I would never, never (hypothetically) wish this child's life unlived. But we can't affirm the goodness of it without also asking hard questions.  For instance, given all this blessing business, does it automatically follow that the affair which gave this child life was not a grave error? Does my child's life undo the damage wrought by infidelity? Does it un-hurt the hurt, does it un-betray the betrayal? Does it leave the child in question unscathed by those things? Does it leave me with answers I can feel good about giving her, when the inevitable questions come up?

Tell  story of your life:  it ought to be easy. And it ought not to be littered with cast-off people.

If a child is here, the child has a right to life;  it is right that the child has life. None of that, however, makes adultery any more right, or more desirable as a cultural norm. None of this makes it any more true that, hey, your way of building a family is . . . just your way of building a family.

It's not true. And no laugh track will make it so. Da. Dum. Ching.