THERE’S ONE THING Portlanders won’t take sitting down: threats to a cheap, safe, and reliable supply of birth control.
On Friday, February 18, the US House of Representatives passed a GOP-backed spending plan that cuts all of the $317 million the feds usually give to family-planning programs. On Monday night, February 21, more than 400 Portlanders took to the streets in front of Planned Parenthood’s NE Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue clinic, waving signs at rush-hour traffic and chanting, “Women’s health care is under attack! What do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
Oregon has the highest per capita rate of Planned Parenthood use of any state—in 2009, the local Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette distributed 333,000 units of birth control and did 23,000 STD tests. A whopping 92 percent of their clients qualified for free or subsidized birth control under the threatened federal program.
None of Oregon’s representatives voted for the spending bill, and President Obama has said he will veto the plan if it passes the Senate.
But it’s worth noting what would happen in Oregon if the House budget cuts took effect. The stats included in the following infograph in the sidebar are from research conducted by the Guttmacher Institute.
See a slideshow of photos from the rally here
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Yeah, among other states, [in my birth state] of GA, state rep./christianazi Bobby Franklin has introduced a bill that would classify all abortions as murder & require that hospitals report all miscarriages to the police.
http://politicalcorrection.org/blog/201102…
And they’d probably throw in the death penalty for the mother if the “baby daddy” was…Daddy.
The Guttmacher Institute predicts a 51% increase in abortions in Oregon if Planned Parenthood loses its federal funding. I assume the reason this statistic is displayed so prominently in the sidebar is because abortion is undesirable. There is a simple solution, then: Planned Parenthood stops offering abortions.
It’s a win all around — Planned Parenthood keeps its funding, thousands of Oregonians continue receiving contraceptive services, fewer pregnancies occur, and the number of abortions goes down.
Maybe PP can stop offering abortions, but there will still be a market for them nonetheless. So, nothing will be solved by PP reducing it’s services.
Save the funding? Why not fund it with private donations? Why not use real birth control? Why enrich corporate abortion doctors? To stupid? Is the man keeping you in the dark, denying you information about the birds and the bees? No he is not! Your irresponsible, reckless and selfish. Some day if you sober up enough think about the missing members of your own family you murdered!
You’re an idiot, throowrocks. Who’s getting “murdered”?
DamosA: You’re right that abortions may not decrease if Planned Parenthood stops offering them. But there’s a good chance they would, since PP is the largest abortion provider in the country. Expectant mothers may be less likely to get an abortion if it is significantly less convenient to do so.
But the point of my comment — which I didn’t make clear — was that if PP doesn’t want its funding jeopardized, all it has to do is stop providing abortions.