Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Are We Really Against Women's Health Care?


Victoria Cobb, President
The Family Foundation of Virginia

At last week’s presidential debate (boxing match?), President Barack Obama’s obsession with Planned Parenthood came through loud and clear.  At one point, among the six times he mentioned the abortion organization, he defended the nation’s largest and richest private abortion provider by saying that it deserves your support through taxpayer dollars because it offers preventative women’s health care with things like mammograms.  To be precise, the President said, “there are millions of women all across the country, who rely on Planned Parenthood for, not just contraceptive care, they rely on it for mammograms….”

 

That statement is one in a long line of attacks on pro-life, conservative Americans who have for years fought to end forced taxpayer subsidization of the $1 billion abortion conglomerate.  And like most of the other attacks, it is completely false.

 

Simply put, Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer mammograms.  In fact, if the President is accurate, then Planned Parenthood is actually violating federal law and is subject to tens of thousands of dollars in fines!

 

According to Casey Mattox, senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom:

 

“Planned Parenthood is breaking the law because it has no license to perform mammograms. As this letter from the Obama Administration’s own Department of Health and Human Services confirms, no Planned Parenthood clinic anywhere in the country is certified to perform mammograms.  The Mammogram Quality Standards Act, administered by the Obama HHS, says that ‘[n]o facility may conduct an examination or procedure…involving mammography’ without a certification from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As the FDA explains, there is a good reason Congress wanted to make sure that women were receiving mammograms only from licensed providers: ‘Congress passed this law in 1992 to assure high-quality mammography for early breast cancer detection, which can lead to early treatment, a range of treatment options, and increased chances of survival.’ The MQSA is a women’s health and safety law, and its licensing requirement is designed to ensure that the mammogram a woman receives is accurate and dependable. Planned Parenthood does not have that required license.”

 

There you have it, if the President is correct Planned Parenthood routinely violates federal law.  Or, the President is simply lying (or is so misinformed it’s frightening) about what Planned Parenthood actually does as part of the perpetual effort by its defenders to paint the abortion conglomerate as focused on “women’s health care” when it is actually all about abortion.

 

Once again, the secular left is attempting to paint those who oppose the forced taxpayer subsidizing of the nation’s largest abortion organization as being opposed to “women’s health care” when it’s Planned Parenthood that has consistently lied about its services and opposed every effort to make its abortion centers safer for women.