Two leading pro-life organizations released a map today intended to showcase the thousands of community health care clinics that could step in for Planned Parenthood if it were to lose federal funding.
The map adds to a heated conversation about whether stripping Planned Parenthood of its $500 million annual taxpayer dollars would hurt women’s health care in America, or if women would be better off without it.
Alliance Defending Freedom and Charlotte Lozier Institute, the education arm of the Susan B. Anthony List, identified the different Planned Parenthood locations and community health care clinics across America.
The two groups argue there are plenty of health centers — that also can receive federal funding — to absorb Planned Parenthood’s patients should the organization be defunded by Congress.
“What these graphics put into pictures is what the data has been telling us for a long time,” Casey Mattox, a senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom who focuses on pro-life issues, told The Daily Signal. “Planned Parenthood is really a small part of the national health care picture in America.”
“Planned Parenthood is really a small part of the national health care picture in America,” @CaseyMattoxADF.
According to data collected by the two groups, there are currently 13,540 clinics providing comprehensive health care for women, versus 665 Planned Parenthood locations.
Community health centers primarily exist to provide comprehensive care tomillions of uninsured, working poor and jobless Americans.
If Planned Parenthood’s federal funding “went away tomorrow,” Mattox argues, the money “would be better used by community health centers and other places around the country that can provide a fuller range of services to women without the ethical challenges that Planned Parenthood presents.”
The effort to defund Planned Parenthood comes after the Center for Medical Progress, a group that opposes abortion, released a series of damaging videos.
The videos show high-ranking Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of tissue from aborted babies and changing abortion procedures to harvest these organs.
The issues raise a host of legal questions and have sparked both state and federal investigations.
Some healthcare experts warn that lawmakers should be careful in punishing Planned Parenthood. These supporters argue community health clinics can’t fulfill the services that Planned Parenthood provides.
“The notion that you could literally overnight defund providers serving a couple million people and think that health centers—even if they’re right nearby, which is not always the case—could just magically absorb patients, I think shows an astounding naivety in healthcare,” says Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University.
“You can map all you want and the fact of the matter is health centers are not magicians and health care doesn’t work this way.”
