Defunding Birth Control

By Patrick Appel
Saletan makes the pro-life case for Planned Parenthood:

The campaign to defund Planned Parenthood is really about abortions. [The Family Research Council] would like to see fewer of them. So would I. And that's the crux of the idiocy: The single best thing you can spend money on to reduce the number of abortions, not just in this country but around the world, is Planned Parenthood.

I'll say that again: If you define pro-life as preventing abortions, Planned Parenthood is the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world. No, it doesn't give teenagers the idea of having sex. That idea comes to them quite naturally, thank you very much. What Planned Parenthood does, more comprehensively than anyone else, is to distribute the means and knowledge to control your risk of getting pregnant when you don't want to be pregnant. And those two things, combined with pressure to exercise that control assiduously, are the surest way to prevent abortions. If you wait till women are already unhappily pregnant, you're too late.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown made a similar point last week.