Actress gets word out about agency’s benefits

Iexpected we’d be talking abortion when I interviewed actress Annette Bening last week before her keynote speech at a Des Moines, Iowa, fundraiser celebrating Planned Parenthood’s 100th birthday. Isn’t that the first thing many people think about when the embattled organization comes up, that it still does abortions against a fierce cultural and political headwind?

But abortion was only a fragment of what the fivetime Oscar nominee and two-time Golden Globe winner and I talked about. She talked about women’s history. She talked about pap smears, breast exams and birth control. She even talked about erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation, male problems Planned Parenthood also treats, though most people don’t know that. And she talked about the critical link between women’s reproductive freedoms and “women’s ability to realize themselves” in general.

“Margaret Sanger felt very strongly about planning families, that women should be able to express their sexuality,” she said, referring to the Planned Parenthood founder and her commitment to birth-control accessibility. That freedom, Bening said, was “the doorway and linchpin into humanity.”

But Iowa’s Republicancontrolled Legislature rejected federal family-planning funds for Planned Parenthood of the Heartland last session, forcing four of its clinics to close. And that’s although, as Bening pointed out, “three out of four of them didn’t do that service (abortion).” In fact, as she also noted, the federal Hyde Amendment has since 1976 barred federal funds from being spent on abortions. So rejecting the money was simply a way for lawmakers to snub an organization they disagree with. There is also proposed federal legislation to defund Planned Parenthood for a year.

Anyone tempted to write Bening off as some Hollywood liberal who doesn’t share their Midwest values need to know this: Her parents were both native Iowans. They met on a blind date while at the University of Iowa but moved to Kansas before she was born and later to San Diego. She still has family in Iowa, with whom she stayed. She called the trip “the perfect connection to my roots.”

Thoroughly likable, genuine and down-to-Earth, the mother of four is so committed to Planned Parenthood that she paid her own airfare and didn’t take a speaker’s fee. The national organization is featured in her most recent film, “Twentieth Century Women,” and received a portion of ticket sales on its opening weekend in January.

Bening calls her own roots to the organization “very personal,” noting she first went to Planned Parenthood as a teenager. In her remarks to more than 500 people in Des Moines, she talked of accompanying a friend faced with unintentional pregnancies to a San Diego clinic. “She was treated with respect, dignity, privacy and no shame,” Bening said to applause.

Her introduction to some of these issues began in a community college women’s studies course in 1977. Now 59, she called that a time of “waking up to a lot of things that were not working.” She notes that her generation was the first of women to have full reproductive rights. Now she fears those rights are being scaled back. She worries about a Trump administration effort to allow employers to opt out of providing employees birth control coverage in their health benefits. Such coverage was required under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Republicans are trying to dismantle. “As far as we’ve come, there are still these rollbacks,” she said.

Some of Bening’s education on gender and sexuality has come from being a mother. Her 25-year-old son with her husband Warren Beatty, Stephen Ira, came out as transgender at age 14. “I learned a lot and he taught me a lot,” she said of Ira.

Education is a critical component of what she says Planned Parenthood provides — education that might not be available elsewhere. For example, it offers specialized services to transgender men who, as Bening pointed out, whether or not they have breast-removal surgery, still need breast exams and cervical cancer testing.

Bening is not doctrinaire and comes across more as a nurturer who wants to bring people together than as a political activist. Case in point: Her parents are Trump supporters and her children are not. They have Thanksgivings together. “Good people with good intentions can have profound disagreements over issues of choice,” she mused.

Actors might have disproportionate influence in society because of their celebrity status. But they can, like Bening, use it for the public good. “I try to use the spotlight I have judiciously,” she said. Reproductive choice and the arts are her two main areas of advocacy.

So instead of dishing out Hollywood gossip or entertaining the crowd with highlights from her movie career, Bening shaved out time to talk to an Iowa columnist about pap smears and breast exams. That’s the unsexy bread-and-butter preventive stuff that Planned Parenthood does most but doesn’t make headlines. Bening will share her headlines to get the word out.