Last night someone posted this comment on my reblog of Jess’ Komen post:
Although I agree with the sentiment that Komen’s choice is a bad one, the above argument is logically stupid. Let’s pretend that PP has a budget of $5000, $500 of which pays for abortions. That’s 10% of PP’s total budget. If Komen provides $5000 to PP, then PP’s budget is $10000 and its abortion budget is 5%. If PP decides to increase its abortion budget to $5000, it can truthfully say that ZERO ACTUAL REAL LIFE DOLLARS pay for abortions. However, it cannot say that it would have been able to have an abortion budget of $5000 without Komen’s grant. To put it another way: Komen’s grant would allow PP to increase its abortion budget by 1000%.
At the time i was pretty mad about the whole situation so i was kind of an asshole in my response. In the cold light of day, though, i’d like to put forth a more serious response, since i’m sure the above argument is one that we can expect to see in the future.
Let’s go ahead and pretend that the above numbers are true, and that Planned Parenthood allocates 5% of it’s budget to providing abortions. That would mean that 95% of it’s budget goes to other things, like paying rent or paying it’s employees or providing other medical services. Since the grant from Komen must be spent on things like breast examines and mammograms, Planned Parenthood can’t just jack up it’s abortion budget and use the Komen money to cover everything else. They wouldn’t get the money in the first place if they tried to do that.
Now i suppose the argument could be made that after receiving the grant, Planned Parenthood could take whatever portion of it’s budget it used to spend on breast examines and put it towards abortions. But your willingness to believe that depends on the opinion you have of Planned Parenthood in the first place. Do you think they are the type of organization who, when they recieved this grant, said “Awesome, now we don’t have to use our own money on this stuff and can give out more abortions instead”? Or do you think they are the type of organization who said “Awesome, we can put this money with the money we already spend and provide breast screenings for a lot more women who need them”?
No matter what side you fall on, the bottom line is that this decision means less money for breast screenings and mammograms for poor/uninsured women, which in turn means that some of them are going to die. That’s all that really matters.
