Doctor wrong about Planned Parenthood, Title X
Federal family planning funding is enormously important in preventing unplanned pregnancies. So it’s crucial that we have the facts right when discussing President Donald Trump’s gag rule, which would cut Title X federal funding to health centers that refer for or support abortion.
Ingrid Skop, an anti-abortion OB-GYN in San Antonio, distorts these facts in her defense of this ideological move (“Title X changes are not a gag rule on abortions at clinics,” June 10).
Skop falsely claims the proposed changes are not a gag rule. What else would you call a policy that prohibits doctors from talking to patients about all their options when faced with an unplanned pregnancy?
She also claims that Planned Parenthood strongly promotes abortion as the favored solution to an unintended pregnancy. In fact, Planned Parenthood strongly promotes prevention as the favored solution to unintended pregnancy — and prevention is what Title X funds help pay for, not abortion.
No one does more to prevent abortion than Planned Parenthood. We know from the 2017 Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Annual Report that 1,854,518 people across the nation received their birth control at Planned Parenthood clinics.
We also know that nationally, abortion services represent only 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. Of the 9,537,592 services provided by a Planned Parenthood clinic in the U.S. in 2017, only 321,384 were abortions.
Here at home, where the number of abortion providers was reduced by more than half following the passage of Texas House Bill 2, abortion still accounts for only 9 percent of the services we provide. (Planned Parenthood South Texas served 19,582 patients in 2017. Only 1,710 of them received an abortion.) Planned Parenthood informs pregnancy patients of all their options and provides referrals for prenatal care and adoption services.
The majority of the care Planned Parenthood provides is birth control, contraception education, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, clinical breast exams, pelvic exams, cervical cancer screenings and more. These are the essential medical services that Title X dollars help us provide to low-income patients.
Contrary to Skop’s falsehoods, Planned Parenthood South Texas’ provision of Pap tests, chlamydia tests, gonorrhea tests and syphilis tests have increased, as have its cervical cancer services. In
2017, PPST provided 3,104 cervical cancer screenings — much more than the 1,710 abortions provided.
While Planned Parenthood health centers make up just 13 percent of Title X centers, they serve 41 percent of all Title X patients. The assertion that community clinics can easily take over provision of women’s sexual and reproductive health care if Planned Parenthood loses Title X funding was disproven by a study from the Kaiser Family Foundation published in March.
Another study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin showed that when Texas “defunded” Planned Parenthood, provision of highly effective contraception went down and births paid for by Medicaid went up.
This shameful gag rule restricts access to comprehensive reproductive health care. Planned Parenthood trusts women, and Planned Parenthood refuses to give up its commitment to providing women with the information they need to make decisions about their bodies and their health care.