Whose Vagina Is It, Anyway?

The October 2015 Planned Parenthood Morbidity and Mortality Report

by Ashley Beth

Planned Parenthood, an organization that for ­­­­­almost 100 years provided communities and families with resources to ensure every childbirth is an expected, welcoming experience for the family members involved is once again under the infamous spotlight for giving the perception that they profit off of the medical waste from a safely executed, legally provided, procedural method of family planning: abortion.

Their most recent attack comes from a video which aired in July 2015. The video was premeditated and executed by a strong anti-abortion campaign, The Center for Medical Progress, or CMP, (ruefully ironic, like the Center for Herbivore Zombies) and produced during a luncheon which they had organized and executed themselves, solely for the intent of swaying viewers into believing that Planned Parenthood is a baby-hating, woman-raping, tissue factory that exploits the delicate states of women to profit off the flesh of babies. In reality, Planned Parenthood was merely invited to a lunch meeting with CMP campaign members who portrayed themselves as advocates for scientific researchers interested in obtaining fetal tissue.

This interrogation stems from the fact that a mere two of Planned Parenthood’s 700+ facilities perform the expensive process of preserving and maintaining post-procedural fetal tissue to be donated for medical research. If you want to get an idea of how many funds go into the sterilization of human anatomy, ask your trusted medical staff/surgeon/tattoo artist. To give you a hint, consider the average hourly wages one pays for their services. The “profit” to which CMP is referring is merely the reimbursement Planned Parenthood receives to cover operating costs of the research facilities that, again, only account for 2 of 700 (a whopping % 0.3 percent).

The key word to remember here is reimbursement. You know, like that time you spent $59 dollars at the office supply store because your understaffed workplace forgot to place their weekly warehouse order. The request for reimbursement is reasonable for Planned Parenthood to sustain low-cost operations so they may continue to use their government-funded resources to fulfill their mission statement.

CMP accuses Planned Parenthood of deeds so unbearably nauseating they are rivaled only by the “Modest Proposal” penned by Jonathon Swift in 1792. (A comical visionary of his time who suggested the devouring of babies as solution to Ireland’s critical population and hunger troubles.)

Once again, as in so many other battles, the side which represents feminine freedom, reproductive rights and the concept that sex is a necessary, naturally occurring, re-occurring physical act with a healthy reward mechanism must persevere over the side that propogates the  grossly extravagant notion that an aborted fetus is a dead baby.

On October 13, 2015, Planned Parenthood responded to the video, announcing they will no longer accept reimbursement for the cost of providing scarcely available research materials and will instead, bear the cost burden entirely on their own. This revision both compromises Planned Parenthood’s cost-containment structure and the availability of fetal tissue to medical research.

But hey, at least we solved some problems for a large part of the U.S. population. After all, reproductive rights have historically been the highest prioritized target for elderly and/or conservative populations whose primary problems with living stem more from sustainable retirement benefits, access to quality and affordable health care and job availability, rather than the personal options legally available to any person who might find themselves staring in shock at the results from a stick upon which they just peed.