A Little Nuancing on Defunding Planned Parenthood
Rachel Held Evans raised some good questions:
"Anyone else caught in this tension?: I'm pro-life in the sense that I believe life begins in the womb [I would say "at fertilization"] and is worth protecting even before birth. However, 9 times out of 10, I find myself totally disagreeing with the pro-life movement's methods for protecting that life.
“For example, completely defunding Planned Parenthood with no plan to replace its other services (like offering affordable contraception, gynecological services, and prenatal care to underprivileged women), could actually lead to more abortions. Teaching abstinence-only education in public schools appears to be less effective than comprehensive sex-education at reducing the teen pregnancy rate. Simply voting for Republicans who want to make abortion illegal (even though they are very unlikely to do so and even though criminalizing abortion won't stop it from happening) without considering how other conservative social policies affect women most at risk for having abortions seems like an exercise in futility.
“And opposing coverage for contraception in insurance policies seems like a great way to increase rather than decrease unwanted pregnancies."
When Dr. Bill and I were coauthoring our book on contraception for the Christian Medical Association, some Christians opposed our talk of methods that did not risk human life. These people wanted us to speak only about abstinence and natural family planning (NFP).
BTW, according to the "2014 State of Dating in America" report published by Christian Mingle, 61% of Christians said they would have sex before marriage. And fifty-six percent said that it's appropriate to move in with someone after dating for a time between six months and two years.
My husband and I abstained till marriage. I'm all for that, believe me. But if most or even many Christians aren't abstaining, how realistic is it to go with abstinence-only teaching in the broader culture? The folks who considered us liberal wanted us to avoid any talk of family planning other than NFP—which we argued is pretty unnatural in that it interrupts sexual fulfillment at the time of the month wives are physically most interested, and for some wives the only time they are interested.
Contraception prevents abortions. We saw that in Russia when women could not get access to contraception, so they used abortion as their chosen method. We met women who'd had five, six, seven, eight abortions.... The married Christians there begged us to bring them contraceptives.
Today, where are the Christians offering alternatives to abortion beyond abstinence and NFP? It's not enough to offer Pregnancy Resource Centers that leave contraception out of the mix. If we are truly against abortion, where is our plan to really prevent them? If we don't care about making contraception affordable and accessible, perhaps we are blinded by our own middle- and upper-class comfort that knows nothing of working three jobs to put food on the table.