snip The political game over abortion, however, is really not much more than a subtext of the bigger clashes over race and class. What was missed during this entire week of debate is that the Komen flap had all kinds of race and class written all over it. But, no one really wanted to step into that. Gatekeepers of partisan talking points struggled with every last breath on talk shows to stay away from either conversation, pretty much using abortion as the perfect cover.
Untouched was the fact that this was pretty much a decision made by pink-ribbon wearing affluent White women comfortably detached from the reality of what Planned Parenthood is doing and who benefits from those services. Amazingly, we got consumed by a discussion on funding for abortions when, in reality, Planned Parenthood only focuses 3% of its services on abortion. While many pro-life conservatives will argue that even one abortion is too many, the math pretty much makes it all look a bit ridiculous and over the top. See the graph attached to this.
I’m not taking any side on the abortion debate. I’m just saying, politically, is not what I would want my elected officials worried about at the moment.
A deeper look at the numbers also shows that over three quarters of women using Planned Parenthood are at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Over a quarter of Planned Parenthood patients are Latinas and 15 percent are Black women; 40% of Latinas and nearly 20% of African American women are uninsured and – oh yeah – nearly 15% of White women are uninsured. Which means that Planned Parenthood health centers are quite possibly the closest thing to primary health care for millions of poor women with inadequate access to affordable, reliable and user-friendly health care.
The problem here is that we’re getting twisted into a knot about abortion when the issue is about whether or not our rather large underserved and impoverished population – which is nearly 20% of Americans – is able to access quality care and preemptive screenings for a vast range of major health disparities. Obviously, that’s still not the case when Black women, for example, are still more likely to die from breast and cervical cancer than White women.
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