George Rebane

In response to my 7aug15 commentary – ‘Planned (alternative to) Parenthood’ – in The Union, the newspaper’s 15aug15 edition contains two related pieces illuminating the liberal mind from the logically lame to the deliberately deceitful.  The first is a letter to the editor from “Dr Larry and Cheryl Cook” (paywalled here), and the second is an Other Voices commentary (paywalled here) by Ms Kimberly D’Urso, the gratefully aborted president of Nevada County Citizens for Choice.  Regular readers may recall our previous consideration of Ms Cheryl Cook in these pages (here and here).

The Cooks’ critique of my commentary is more than mind boggling.  They take me to task for my “blatantly exclusionary focus on women undergoing abortions”.  Apparently I was remiss in not including a comprehensive treatment of all the mass homicides caused by gun toting lunatics in my 750-word piece on Planned Parenthood that according to their lights attempted to treat “the sanctity of all human life, really?”  Well not quite.

Their letter was actually another screed promoting gun control and confiscation in America, and their desperate logic attempted to connect the 860,000 annual abortion deaths to the tens of annual mass killings by deranged lunatics and dedicated terrorists.  A careful perusal of the letter engenders hope about Dr Larry Cook, that if he works in healthcare, he doesn’t use similar logical constructs to cobble together his patients’ diagnoses and subsequent prescriptions.  About Ms Cheryl Cook, our already stated position continues to serve.

Ms D’Urso’s commentary is a quadruped of a different hue.  She repeats the deceptive pro-PP arguments that have become the de rigueur of abortion apologetics.  The first is the generic progressive proposition that something that government does not pay for is then considered to be prohibited, censored, proscribed, etc by that same government.  Ergo, opposing government funding of abortion is tantamount to supporting the prohibition of abortion in the land.  This deceit has numerous attendant corollaries in the liberal mind that range from specific notions such as ‘opposing women’s healthcare’ to conducting a general ‘war on women’.

Regarding PP, she launches into the deceptive reprise of the organization’s “services” of which 97% are claimed not related to the abortion event (service) itself.  This argument will serve to convince the intellectually compressed and gruberized of the land that an equivalent fraction of PP’s private and public funding is so apportioned, thereby guaranteeing that no federal monies are used to fund abortions per se.  The more informed reader is instantly jolted by this claim when he considers that PP's performing over 330,000 (or 40% of the annual total) abortions in a clinically standard-of-care environment is expensive (consider the insurance alone), and must consume the lion’s share of the PP budget.  And since PP's received income is fungible, federal dollars do indeed fund abortions in their clinics.

The aboveboard solution for PP is simple.  Calve off another organization, say, ‘Planned Abortions Unlimited’, that does nothing but provide clinically safe abortions.  PAU would operate as a charity and be funded only by private sector donations already claimed to fund that service – no government monies will cross its threshold.  Then PAU could abort to its heart’s content and ‘sell’ or otherwise make available body parts galore for research or whatever legal purposes are allowed for such ‘fetal tissues’.

PP itself would then remain pristine of all the guts and gore, and continue to provide all the other women’s health services to which it lays claim.  But methinks the progressives know that such an arrangement would not fly financially; there is not enough charitable funding in America to provide for aborting healthy humans gestating in healthy yet careless women.  However, I do believe that sufficient charitable funding would be available for aborting certain limited categories of women that involve health issues with the mother-to-be and/or the life inside her.  Such abortion clinics could then be run like any other privately funded secular humanist charity.

But the Left, led locally by Ms D’Urso, does not want to recognize the fundamental tenet of our republic’s governance – that government should not fund extra- and/or un-constitutional activities which are repulsive to a large fraction of its citizen taxpayers.  For the likes of D’Urso such funding programs are the sum and stuff of using other people's money to buy votes from the ill-informed and uninformable.  And we all know that it works.

[16aug15 update]  True to form and wholly expected, the comment stream below is replete with liberal histrionics that derive from the primal principle of progressives – (from above) “something that government does not pay for is then considered to be prohibited, censored, proscribed, etc by that same government.”  Their uninformed anguish is real, they sincerely believe that if Planned Parenthood ceases to receive government funding, then women across the land will again be forced to auto-abort with coat hangers, and in the interval have nowhere to turn for other health services they need.  In reality there is no basis for that hysteria.  There are solutions to modifying PP as I outlined above, but more importantly the country is populated with abundant private abortion clinics which perform the service for free or a fee.  And other women’s health services not offering abortions abound.  Here are three right here in Nevada County.

-        Western Sierra Medical Clinic, 844 Old Tunnel Rd, GV; 530-274-9762

-        Sierra Family Medical Clinic, 15301 Tyler-Foote Rd, NC; 530-292-3478

-        Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital, GV; Barbara Schmidt Millar Memorial Fund, a 501c3, and other charities provide the hospital funds for women’s health services including mammograms.

Finally, the feds themselves now promise to provide women’s health services through Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid (here MediCal) as another alternative to PP.

Meanwhile, I’m told by correspondents, that certain local leftwing cretins’ reading of the above piece has raised their ire sufficiently to call me and conservative RR readers “misogynists” for daring to suggest that abortion is not universally embraced in America, and that such procedures should not be funded by government because of their extra-constitutionality and opposition by a large fraction of Americans.  For those who may have forgotten, misogynist is “a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women.”