The result of the conservative war against Planned Parenthood: it seems to have backfired.
PERSONAL NOTE: To me, the war against Planned Parenthood has been as dismaying as when I arrived in Spain and as a young stringer heard the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in his last speech warn thousands of Spaniards in a huge crowd to beware of the Masonic conspiracy.
Earlier, during the 1960s and 70s, I was not just a student of Indian politics and events but lived there as a college student doing an internship on a New Delhi newspaper and later came back to freelance there from 1973-1975. The bulk of my stories (sent via Reuters wire) went to the Chicago Daily News. Family planning was a HUGE issue in India. It was a “given” that it was an admirable topic for education and an admirable goal. It has been now proven that recent claims that Planned Parenthood uses federal money for abortions are bogus – -typical of how in modern day politics it is believed that if you repeat something false over and over as a mantra it’ll be believed. And this does work.
But just as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker may have done more to boost sagging unions than a revival of the old pro-union musical Pins and Needles, the conservative attack on Planned Parenthood has been a boost to the organization. But, yes, there are some of us scratching our heads over this latest demon to join the cast of demons used to hit hot buttons to please a party’s base.
Any day now I’m expecting to hear someone in Congress talk about about the threat to the nation posed by the Rotary Club. This time it won’t be a surprise.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.