"The nation’s premier provider of abortions doesn’t want to be known for providing abortions.
Planned Parenthood, embroiled in a scandal over secret videos capturing its cavalier dismemberment of unborn babies and sale of their body parts, insists that abortion is only 3 percent of what it does.
Practically every defender of the organization, fighting to preserve its federal funding, reverts to the 3 percent figure.
How could you possibly, they ask, defund a group that devotes itself overwhelmingly to uncontroversial procedures and services for women?
Only Planned Parenthood would think saying that they only kill babies 3 percent of the time is something to brag about.
How much credit would we give someone for saying he only drives drunk 3 percent of the time, or only cheats on business trips 3 percent of the time, or only hits his wife during 3 percent of domestic disputes?
The 3 percent factoid is crafted to obscure the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business.
The group performs about 330,000 abortions a year, or roughly 30 percent of all the abortions in the country.
By its own accounting in its 2013–2014 annual report, it provides about as many abortions as Pap tests (380,000).
The group does more breast exams and provides more breast-care services (490,000), but not by that much.
The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services.
So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.
By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test, and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion.
This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion."
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