How hating on Planned Parenthood is about hating on women, not about hating on abortion

I’ve been following the story of the Bus driver who refused to bring women to Planned Parenthood because they might get abortions pretty closely in a number of online communities. And I’ve noticed that first out the gate in terms of commenting is usually someone pointing out that Planned Parenthood offers way more services than just abortion. Which is very true. And although it chafes at me that this is considered an appropriate response and not at all a way of further dividing women into sluts and good girls, the fact is that the people who protest outside of Planned Parenthood clinics know this. Of course they know this. They can’t stand around with their bullhorns and their fetus dolls day in and day out and not have women indignantly explain that they’re only going in for a pap smear and get the point that a woman entering a Planned Parenthood is not a guaranteed abortion. But focusing on the fact that Planned Parenthood offers much broader services than just pregnancy termination is missing the point of the anti-choice crusade against Planned Parenthood. It’s not that the anti-choice don’t want abortions to be performed, it’s that they don’t want women to have reproductive medical care available to them at all.

Let’s examine the evidence surrounding this statement:

Anti-choicers point to Pregnancy Crisis Centers as an alternative to Planned Parenthood. Pregnancy Crisis Centers often set up shop next to Planned Parenthood, and attempt to lure women away from Planned Parenthood and into their facilities so that they can be bullied and lied to in an effort to prevent an abortion. But these centers cannot perform any medical services beyond administering over-the-counter pregnancy tests and performing an ultrasound. If these clinics were truly about providing an alternative to Planned Parenthood, you would think they would want to provide as many services as possible and establish a doctor-patient level of trust with the women coming to them for routine medical exams before it comes time to bully them into not having the abortion.

The reason this will never happen is because a fundamental part of women’s routine reproductive care is the provision of reliable birth control, and Pregnancy Crisis Clinics aren’t at all interested in hooking up women with reliable birth control. They instead opt to tell women that birth control doesn’t work.. It’s not just that the Crisis Pregnancy Center’s purpose is entirely geared towards a very specific moment in a woman’s life (when she realizes she’s pregnant and wants to terminate), it’s that they actively involve themselves to place women in that situation.

Anti-choicers bully any woman attempting to enter a Planned Parenthood. Knowing that Planned Parenthood offers a range of services, and that not every Planned Parenthood offers abortion services (some clinics do, some do not), you can still rely on anti-choicers shouting at women attempting to enter the facility. This happened to a family member of mine who was actually trying to get medical treatment because she was TRYING to have a baby and was having difficulty.

The point isn’t that they were playing “better safe than sorry.” They knew that the facility my family member was going to was not an abortion service provider.

The point is that they want to make women account for their being there and hand over private medical information.

When you shout back at a protester “I’m only going in for a pap smear!” what you’re doing is subtly reinforcing a couple of anti-choice narratives:

1. That they have a right to demand from you very personal information: That the onus is on you to defend your reason for being there, and not that they should have to defend their demand that you reveal to them what is basically confidential medical information apropos of nothing. And…
2. That you’re a “good girl” who doesn’t deserve to be treated the way you’re being treated (unlike those “other women” who are going into the Planned Parenthood for dirty abortions), thus subtly agreeing to their belief that abortion is wrong.

Again, if Crisis Pregnancy Centers (notice they can’t even be called “Clinics”) offered any reproductive health services at all, the Anti-choicers could at least claim that you -could- get the medical treatment you need at a CPC. But they know full well that women cannot get pelvic exams, prenatal care, STI testing, relationship counseling, (Really, the list is pretty damn long) at these centers and leave the horrible abortions to Planned Parenthood. But they can’t, and they don’t even try.

The fact that Crisis Pregnancy Centers can’t offer women the basic medical care that they need while their grunts stand outside of a place that does and shouts at every woman who passes through its doors is incredibly telling. The fact that the right wing spends a great deal of effort equating Planned Parenthood with Abortion and Only Abortion (to the point where some people will spit out the words “Planned Parenthood” and expect any decent American to hiss and spit) while offering no real alternative tells you all you need to know about the real agenda behind Planned Parenthood hate.

It’s not about hating on Abortion. Abortion is very convenient because enough of the country has bought into the hand-wringing “oh-the-tragedy-of-it-all” narrative that the anti-choice has spent the last thirty years so carefully constructing. The anti-choice knows that Planned Parenthood offers services far beyond pregnancy termination. They know that Planned Parenthood is not an Abortion Factory, that it indeed provides many women with the reproductive care that will allow them to have families.

They just don’t care.

We need to stop pretending that their railing against an institution that provides women with important medical services while offering nothing comparable of their own is anything more than what it is, which is the naked hatred of women and the desire to see them suffer.