Culture

Planned Parenthood Should Stay Off Twitter

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(Jjayo/Dreamstime)
Every leftist issue gets a shout-out by Planned Parenthood’s tweeters.

‘Depriving inmates of condoms exacerbates infections [sic] disease. Mass incarceration is reproductive injustice.”

Sadly, this is an all-too-real tweet from Planned Parenthood, and it is merely one of a laundry list of self-righteous tweets in which the group asserts that nearly every public controversy could be resolved by passing out more free birth control or enabling more taxpayer-funded abortions. Whether the issue at hand is mass incarceration, toxic water, or voting rights, restricted access to abortion and contraception is the real underlying problem, or so Cecile Richards would have you believe.

Under the banner of “intersectionality,” Planned Parenthood continuously parades a wide variety of “social justice” issues across its public-relations platforms, portraying each issue as somehow inherently linked to the abhorrent lack of “reproductive justice” in our society. No more evidence of this is needed than a brief (or deep, if you’re feeling masochistic) dive into Planned Parenthood’s various Twitter accounts. Indeed, after any national controversy, the organization is the first to hop into the fray, demanding more “reproductive freedom” to assuage an extensive selection of liberal causes.

For example, over the past couple of months, Planned Parenthood has ramped up its unrelenting efforts to paint all instances of escalating tension between black citizens and the police as the consequence of a society that does not guarantee full “reproductive freedom.” Judging from its many comments on the subject, though, the group has made little-to-no effort to substantiate such an argument, perhaps because to do so would be impossible.

Here are some select tweets, highlighting the organization’s penchant for equating “racial justice” and “reproductive freedom”:

While tension between white and black citizens and the highly publicized series of officer-involved shootings might be worth national focus, it is ridiculous to propose that racial conflict and reproductive issues are as intimately related to one another as Planned Parenthood maintains. And the idea that the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were somehow the result of reproductive oppression is laughable at best.

It is remotely feasible that these issues are tangentially related, but there is no connection strong enough to merit claims as explicit and off-base as these. Planned Parenthood’s frequent endeavors to force itself into public debates and advance its pro-abortion agenda often suffer from a dearth of evidence, as in this case, which makes them even easier to debunk.

During the water-contamination crisis in Flint, Mich., Planned Parenthood latched onto the idea that the lack of clean water was somehow incontrovertible evidence of a war against women, but the group did not clarify whether the war was being waged by the toxic water itself or the local government. Some of the group’s choicest tweets on the subject:

[This one was retweeted by Planned Parenthood]

There are two items of note here. First, the only possible connection to be made in this case between “environmental justice” and reproductive issues is the fact that a woman likely can’t sustain a healthy pregnancy if she is drinking toxic water. But the same is true of any number of things outside the realm of reproductive health. For example, a man who wants to be a marathon runner will have a difficult time achieving his goal if he can only drink contaminated water while he trains.

Second, the idea of women losing “wanted pregnancies” betrays an unacknowledged irony frequently found in Planned Parenthood’s media. If a woman wants a child and can’t have one, that’s a reproductive injustice, as apparently might have been the case in Flint, Mich. But if a pregnant woman in Flint didn’t want to keep her child, perhaps the toxic water would actually be an instrument of “reproductive justice”?

Then there was the time in mid June when Planned Parenthood decided it was qualified to ascertain the underlying causes of the Orlando nightclub shooting, as well as uncover the hidden motives of mass-murderer Omar Mateen. The group’s theories were presented — without proof, of course — in a series of tweets:

Given that Mateen openly pledged allegiance to ISIS and described himself as an “Islamic soldier” in a 911 call during his attack, it borders on absurd to claim that the attack was unrelated to Islam. Even if the shooter was motivated by a number of factors, completely eliminating Islam from the discussion is deceitful.

It would be interesting to examine Planned Parenthood’s evidence for how “imperialist homophobia” and “toxic masculinity” played a fundamental role in the shooting, as well as how an expansion of “reproductive freedom” might have prevented the attack. But then, that would mean the group actually bothered to corroborate its latest improbable assertions.

Around the 51st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Planned Parenthood concluded that the right to vote is equivalent to the right to have an abortion.

Insofar as Planned Parenthood means that citizens can protect their “reproductive rights” by voting for candidates who support abortion and other token “women’s rights” issues, this claim is comprehensible. But to argue that voting rights literally are reproductive rights is to take things too far. This kind of overstatement — in which Planned Parenthood makes a claim with a grain of truth and then blows the connection completely out of proportion — is a common theme no matter the issue at hand.

Finally, consider a handful of Planned Parenthood’s most ironic tweets related to children’s wellbeing, along with a couple of other intriguing contentions:

When Donald Trump jokingly kicked a crying baby out of his rally, Planned Parenthood quickly jumped onto Twitter to attack him. Either the group didn’t notice or didn’t care that condemning anyone for not welcoming babies is highly ironic, considering its automatic support for and provision of abortion-on-demand.

The same goes for the group’s critique of Trump’s child-care plan — that it “leaves children out” — and its outrage over the wrongful death of a seven-year-old black girl. Though these issues merit public attention, it’s hard to take the tweets seriously since Planned Parenthood makes a large portion of its profit from poisoning and dismembering children in the womb.

The fact that Planned Parenthood has to make such convoluted leaps in logic to connect this vast swath of special-interest concerns to its reproductive rights agenda reveals the problem with the liberal tendency to group a number of unrelated issues under one huge umbrella. This phenomenon explains, for example, why the recent Movement for Black Lives platform attacked Israel for being an “apartheid state”, despite the lack of connection between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the challenges encountered by black Americans.

It is increasingly evident that today’s Democratic party is composed of a disparate collection of special-interest groups, the concerns of which are diverse and often unrelated. Though these areas of focus might occasionally intersect, it is both disorienting and disingenuous for Planned Parenthood to continually insert itself into the debate of the day in support of “reproductive justice,” a cause that is all-too-often unrelated to the conversation at hand.

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