BY SHARON MARTIN
Sen. Lankford, you call yourself pro-life. You don’t like the Affordable Care Act, which has expanded insurance coverage to millions of Americans. You support the governor in her decision to reject the Medicaid expansion in the state you serve. You don’t like Planned Parenthood, whose services include pregnancy prevention and cancer screenings.
You can’t be both pro-life and anti-healthcare.
Perhaps the health of poor women doesn’t matter to you. What about the children? You can’t proclaim the holiness of a fetus then deny parents needed services like food stamps and the WIC program after the child is born.
And then there’s a woman’s right to choose. Can you say how you might decide if you were raped, either by a stranger or a family member? Can you tell me what you’d choose if the child had serious deformities that would make his life unbearable? What is the life of the mother worth?
Whatever you’d choose in any of these situations doesn’t give you the right to make that decision for anyone else in the first place. The child of a meth addict, the child of a single mother who works two jobs, and a healthy child with a stay-at-home parent are not born equal. And you don’t have the right to make family-planning decisions for any of these mothers.
And now you’ve jumped on the Let’s-Get-Planned-Parenthood bandwagon. Anyone with an Internet connection can find out that the recent video about Planned Parenthood’s practice of salvaging fetal tissue is misleading at best. Yet you use this bit of propaganda to join the lynch mob.
If the tissue of an aborted child is used to save another life, isn’t that pro-life?
About one-third of Planned Parenthood’s funding comes from government grants and contracts. No government money can be used for abortion services, the smallest of the categories of services offered by the healthcare provider at about three percent.
More than 90% of the clients of Planned Parenthood come for testing and treatment of STDs, cancer screening and prevention, contraception, and other women’s health services. When you close down all the Planned Parenthood clinics, where will the 30 million American women who use these services go?
Until and unless you are willing to make healthcare available and affordable for every citizen of this country, please stop calling yourself pro-life. And check your facts. If we can’t trust you to be honest on the matter of Planned Parenthood, can we trust you on other matters?
– Sharon Martin lives in Oilton, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
