- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
...is to stop Planned Parenthood from being able to provide health care to ANYONE. Their sole agenda is to see that any and all unplanned babies get born, no matter the consequences to those babies' parents. Remember: The most extreme Planned Parenthood foes truly believe that all hormonal birth control is a de facto abortifacient. And some of those folks believe that this country started to go downhill, morally, when it became legal to dispense condoms--to MARRIED PEOPLE(!). Yes, these folks want to send us all back to the Good Ol' Days of "Angela's Ashes," when Catholic parents couldn't (wouldn't?) plan their families, and children literally starved to death. But at least those kids got to be born (and baptized).
Planned Parenthood has every right to sue these folks. And that's exactly what those folks WANT to have happen, because it's their intention to subpoena every confidential medical record and all personnel records in Planned Parenthood's offices, in the name of "discovery." We can well-imagine what illegal use to which they'd put that information.
In California, we have a "safe haven" law that has the purpose of giving women who've given birth a safe way to "dump" their newborn babies at certain public facilities--an alternative that preserves their anonymity and has no legal consequences for them...or to whomever fathered their children. This law has saved hundreds of babies (and it COULD save hundreds more, if every girl or woman who wanted to hide the fact that she'd given birth would avail herself of this law). If these Planned Parenthood harassers were to be consistent in their POV, however, they'd surely be against the "safe haven" law, because it potentially allows adult men to father children by minors with impunity. I never saw those folks objecting to that law when it was being debated, and the reason is because they don't really care about minor girls--they only care that as many babies as possible get born. And when they've accomplished that goal, they'll set to work on ensuring that ever-more babies get conceived in the first place.
