Here's a Nasty Spike: Abortions Are Up

Howard Dean on Meat and PissMeet the Press with GE's favorite blubber boy, Tim Russert, confirmed a statistic I read elsewhere: abortions are up in this country by a whopping 25% since Captain Flightsuit took office.

The reasons why are rather obvious: economic downturn coupled with the rabid right's efforts to do everything in their power to make certain that birth control is not permitted. I also suspect an underlying factor in this rise is the ill-advised "abstinence only" programs Mr. Bush pushes that are actively lying to both teenagers and adults about the effectiveness of birth control.

While I'm for teaching kids and even adults about abstinence (it worked for me at a time in my life), making it the only method you teach - combined with outright lies that condoms and birth control pills are 70-80% ineffective (when they're usually more than 90% successful) - is going to result in more unplanned pregnancies which in turn is going to lead to more abortions.

But the rabid right will look at these statistics and say, "All the more reason to end ALL abortions", thinking people should question these programs and policies that are denying birth control at pharmacies, in clinics, in education programs, and those foolhardy - and foolish - protestors blocking women from getting into places like Planned Parenthood.

Again, I'm a big fan of Planned Parenthood. Not because I wanted an abortion (I've never had one), but because they taught me how not to get pregnant unless I wanted to do so. Among other things - including their health screenings that alerted me to things like a breast mass, performed on a sliding scale fee - they informed me about all my options, includin abstinence. When I wasn't a good candidate for the pill, they helped me find methods that would work well and didn't hurt my health.

Planned Parenthood has never been about abortions, except to those who want to deny women any right to choose. Many Planned Parenthood offices, to my knowledge, perform NO abortions. Yet they are constantly targeted by the nut quotient.