www.ppelpaso.com

photo © 2008 Cliff | more info (via: Wylio)Not that we need any more evidence that PP is under attack. We know that we are fighting an uphill battle in a conservative country that rejects women’s rights and endangers female health with the hyper-ideological catchall “pro-life”. What I just don’t understand is why we are still talking about what the Founding Fathers would have done. We live in the 21st century, are we going back to Newton to discuss the future of science? Unfortunately that is exactly the content of debates today. The North Carolina senate just decided to defund Planned Parenthood, making it the third state after Indiana and Kansas. That is one thing. Money is scarce, times are bad. The problem is that conservatives are continuing to frame the debate in terms of an ideological battle between those that preserve Americas freedom and those that want to undermine it. Kinda sad, if you ask me.

Let me just briefly quote from an op-ed by “Townhall” columnist Paul Kengor: “Sadly, progressives have long pushed for government powers almost solely in the federal direction. Healthcare and Planned Parenthood’s ‘services’ are just the latest manifestation.” I think the “services” in quotation marks gives him away. Not only does Kengor question the integrity and hard work of those who continue to struggle to improve the situation of mostly poor women – he also claims that they do so for ideological reasons. Liberal responses he calls “hysterical”, in itself a very loaded term used to discredit women throughout the Nineteenth Century, mainly to justify their exclusion from the public sphere. If that doesn’t say it all.