The entry to downtown Sacramento’s Planned Parenthood clinic is literally transparent. Through tall windows, you can see right into the waiting room from the sidewalk outside.
This week, the women walking in and out were equally open.
One visitor to downtown Sacramento’s Planned Parenthood clinic, Stephanie Porter of Rio Linda, explained that she appreciates the clinic because “they’ve saved me plenty of times. Like, the Plan B pills you get in the stores? They cost like $50, $60. People steal that stuff. Here, they give you condoms, Plan B pills, birth control pills, IUDs, everything.” Dick Schmidt Sacramento Bee file
“I’ve been coming here since I was a teenager,” said Maria Martinez, 28, of Oak Park, in for a checkup. “I was a teen mom.”
“I’m not ready to be pregnant,” shrugged Stephanie Porter, 24, of Rio Linda. “And they’ve saved me plenty of times. Like, the Plan B pills you get in the stores? They cost like $50, $60. People steal that stuff. Here, they give you condoms, Plan B pills, birth control pills, IUDs, everything.”
“I come for my examinations,” said a 37-year-old Sacramento homemaker named Luz, who was pregnant with her third and, she said firmly, last child. She’d been getting checkups and contraception at Planned Parenthood for 10 years “porque es gratis – we have emergency Medi-Cal only and it is free.”
If all you knew about Planned Parenthood was what has been in the news, you might reasonably wonder what shady business people there are up to. For weeks, a veteran of the radical anti-abortion youth group Live Action has been releasing undercover videos that purport to show the organization’s leaders illegally profiting from the sale of aborted fetuses.
SENSATIONAL AS THEY MAY BE, THE TAPES COMPLETELY MISS THE POINT OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S DAY-TO-DAY OPERATION, WHICH HAS JUST ABOUT NOTHING TO DO WITH FETAL TISSUE, OR EVEN ABORTION.
The tapes have predictably generated much political grandstanding and partisan “investigation.” I put that word in quotes because both the tapes and the furor are clearly more about galvanizing true believers in a presidential campaign year than about the legalities of using fetal tissue and stem cells for medical research.
But provocative as they may be, the tapes completely miss the point of Planned Parenthood’s day-to-day operation, which has just about nothing to do with fetal tissue, or even abortion. And to spend an afternoon at one of its 700 clinics is to be reminded repeatedly just how random a tangent its enemies have taken with this fetal tissue gambit.
Not that the tapes aren’t upsetting to watch. Just as it’s grotesque to see a helpless child go unloved by some woman – or man, or teenager – who had no business at that point in life becoming a parent, most Americans have mixed feelings about abortion, and no one who has ever had one goes around boasting about it.
But 80 percent of the 2.7 million people who visit Planned Parenthood each year are like the women in downtown Sacramento, there not to commit some stigmatized last resort, but to rightly ensure that they don’t get pregnant with children they don’t want in the first place. And most of the other 20 percent are there for things such as sexually transmitted disease tests and breast exams.
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