The new season of Netflix’s awkward puberty show “Big Mouth” defends Planned Parenthood as a life-saver and repeats a false statistic the abortion giant uses to make it seem like killing unborn babies is not its primary business. The teenage characters defend Planned Parenthood in an episode called “The Planned Parenthood Show.”
“Maybe you should go to a doctor, or Planned Parenthood,” says Missy (Jenny Slate). Jay (Jason Mantzoukas) shoots back, “It’s an abortion factory.”
Jessi (Jessi Klein) shoots back, “Jay, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never even been to a Planned Parenthood.”
Missy argues that “they do a lot more than abortions.” Jessi chimes in, “Yeah, they save lives.”
To illustrate the point, the show delves into a “Star Wars”-style story featuring the heroes (in a spaceship shaped like a uterus) facing villains (from Texas in a spaceship shaped like a penis) and fixing an ovarian cyst. As if none of that were problematic…
Eventually, Jay admits, “Okay, fine. Maybe Planned Parenthood does a couple cancer screenings. But it’s mostly abortions.”
“A common misconception, Jay,” Missi shoots back. “Abortions make up only a tiny percentage of what they do.”
This quip referred to a common liberal talking point defending Planned Parenthood, arguing that abortion accounts for only “3 percent” of the organization’s services.
Planned Parenthood crafted that statistic by counting up all of its discrete services and weighing them as if they were completely equal. In 2017, the organization carried out 321,384 abortions, roughly the same number of breast exams (336,614) and a small number compared to the number of “birth control information and services” (2.7 million).
When considering cost and impact on a person’s life, however, providing a condom or even a month’s supply of birth control pills is nothing compared to performing an abortion. Weighing these two actions as if they were completely equal “services” is fundamentally dishonest.
As National Review‘s Rich Lowry pointed out, “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.”
“Such cracked reasoning could be used to obscure the purpose of any organization,” Lowry argued. “The sponsors of the New York City Marathon could count each small cup of water they hand out (some 2 million cups, compared with 45,000 runners) and say they are mainly in the hydration business. Or Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season, so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do.”
Furthermore, if abortion were so tangential to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line, the abortion giant’s activism would make little sense. Planned Parenthood fights tooth and nail against any restrictions to abortion, supported a law that would force pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion clinics, and vociferously attacked Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the grounds that he would overturn Roe v. Wade (1970).
Planned Parenthood performs about 30 percent of abortions in the United States. In 2017, it killed 321,384 unborn babies, while providing only 7,762 prenatal services.
The most recent report of Planned Parenthood’s services documented a decrease in every kind of service, except abortion. The organization performed 126 abortions for every adoption referral.
Meanwhile, pro-life pregnancy centers are expanding across America. These centers perform many vital services Planned Parenthood boasts about. Importantly, they encourage mothers facing crisis pregnancies to keep their children, giving them counseling, prenatal services, and more. Planned Parenthood denounces these competitors as “fake clinics,” but they are growing and meeting women’s needs across America.
Netflix’s “Big Mouth” can engage in abortion activism — its creators have freedom of speech, after all. The Planned Parenthood episode even anticipated some conservative push-back. None of that makes the “3 percent” lie any more true, however.
Make no mistake: Planned Parenthood is about abortion, and no PR campaign can silence that crucial fact.
Watch the trailer for “Big Mouth” for a taste of its weird vulgarity.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTC7wQMHHEA
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