Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Planned Parenthood lobbying lies again. Surprised?

I got one another email from the Planned Parenthood mailing list, beseeching me to watch "Tiffany's Story" and beg my congrescritter for abortion coverage in Obamacare:

So much of the national conversation on health care reform is about the politics ... It seems that some lawmakers and pundits have forgotten what this is really all about: getting people the care they need. That's why I want to share a moving story from Tiffany, a mother of three in South Dakota.

In this brief video, Tiffany describes the kind of deeply private, personal and difficult decision that some women like her are forced by circumstance to make in this country regarding their families and their health. I admire her bravery in sharing this story with Planned Parenthood and supporters like you, and I urge you to watch Tiffany tell her story in her own words.

Then, tell your representative in Congress to focus on what matters and pass health care reform without new restrictions on abortion coverage. Because it's not about politics, who's winning, and who's losing. It's about Tiffany, and women like her all around the country who need health care reform, and need it now.


This is a bald-faced self-interested lie by PP. This is about politics, and about winning, and about losing. But mostly, it's about Planned Parenthood putting more tax money in their coffers. And they're not above exploiting a family's tragedy to do it.

I don't know if Tiffany was lied to by her doctor and/or by Planned Parenthood, if she's a well-meaning but misinformed dupe, or if she knows better but out of loyalty to the abortion agenda is willfully lying. Either way, Planned Parenthood's use of Tiffany has to be exposed as the fraud it is. We should defund these cruel rat-bastards.

You might want to go back and look at the original (and effective) misleading use of Tiffany's story that the grotesquely misnamed "Campaign for Healthy Families" did when they were fighting the South Dakota abortion ban bill: Wrong on Three Counts.

Tiffany's situation simply didn't apply under the proposed South Dakota abortion ban, but the "Campaign for [un]Healthy Families" used it anyway, because it was effective; because most people would simply take the sad but still grateful woman at her word and not question her. And thus, they'd never question the agenda of "Campaign for [un]Healthy Families".

Let's look at the newly repackaged Tiffany story:



Tiffany implied that she was given two choices -- do a selective reduction to abort one twin, or do nothing and let both of them die. She very carefully chooses her words so that we're left in the dark as to whether or not she was offered the recommended treatments for Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS), so we can't tell if Tiffany's doctor didn't offer her a way to try to save both babies, or if he presented it as so unlikely to succeed as to be not worth trying, or if he just falsely gave her the choice, "Abort one or lose both." Because of this vital information gap, I don't think the story is told in Tiffany's own words. A layman wouldn't have the media savvy to be that carefully and diabolically ambiguous.

Let's get some words from experts:

What if I’ve been told that there is no hope for my babies diagnosed with TTTS? This may have been the case 25 years ago, but there is tremendous hope now for your babies. TTTS has been the focus of a few serious researchers and their work, who had to overcome the prevailing pessimism at the time to create a new reality for your babies. All you have to do is read the Foundation’s web site, and see what former TTTS couples on our message boards have to say. You will know that your babies can make it, and be healthy. Never give up. We are here to help you.


Aside from the way Planned Parenthood carefully crafted the story to make it appear that Tiffany's only choices were to abort one baby or lose both, there's the way Planned Parenthood hides behind TIffany and holds her up as representative of women submitting to abortions. But that's just the way of the abortion lobby -- to use women in tragic circumstances as human shields to deflect criticism of their own lies and deceptions. Women facing a grave personal or fetal anomaly represent only a tiny fraction of women submitting to abortions -- yet PP wants you to lobby as if they were the norm. And what's more, PP never even addresses whether or not abortion really is the best option for these women. They simply assume that any problem that arises for a pregnant woman is best treated with abortion. Which, of course, makes sense for Planned Parenthood, since it's the only thing that they really offer to pregnant women.

Planned Parenthood wants money. Lots of money. YOUR money. To pay for abortions, even those performed without parental knowledge on underage girls pregnant through unreported sexual abuse.

This isn't about helping women like Tiffany. It's about using women like Tiffany for public relations purposes to try to emotionally blackmail taxpayers into funding elective abortions.

For more information about what real care for mothers like Tiffany would look like, see Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome Foundation. And this appropriate and dually-lifesaving care is covered by most insurance. It's pretty iffy regarding whether it'd be covered by Obamacare, which seeks to "reduce costs" and "focus on prevention".

5 comments:

L. said...

Coincidentally, I know a pregnant woman here in Japan facing possible TTTS. She's going to try to save both babies, but she has been told that the treatment probably won't work, that it rarely succeeds -- and Japanese health insurance doesn't cover it.

Christina Dunigan said...

That blows that her insurance won't cover it. Is there a prolife movement in Japan, where she can seek help?

L. said...

I don't think she's prolife -- I think she will just pay out of pocket if necessary.

I think Japan has the right idea, overall -- it doesn't pay for abortion OR childbirth, just as America used to be. When my parents had kids in the 60's, they had health insurance but they had to pay for the births themselves -- it wasn't something they felt "entitled" to. I had 2 out of 3 kids under our Japanese insurance -- it kicked it for major medical (c-sections), but we paid a lot of it ourselves. I really think this is the way to go -- you want "free" reproductive choices, you pay as you go.

Christina Dunigan said...

She doesn't have to be prolife overall, just as regards these babies in particular. It's just that I've not seen any prochoice organizations that help women get assistance to give birth to wanted babies. (I tried to put a list in my sidebar of prochoice organizations that give practical help to women who want to make a BIRTH choice, but usually within a couple of months of finding one, the site folds.)

I had to finance my daughter's birth, which meant that I shopped around for the best deals without compromising our care. It took us about 18 months to "pay her off". My son was born in a military hospital with a $28 co-pay. If I had it to do again I'd have gone to a civilian hospital and financed it and taken a couple of years to pay it off. The "free" (or almost "free") care we got sucked. (And how "free" is it when they basically OWN my husband? He bartered himself for "free" medical care for his family._

L. said...

We found (in LA, in the late '90's) that hospitals and doctors offered "cash packages" -- standard treatment for uninsured patients who were paying in cash or by credit card. I dimly recall the standard c-section cash rate to be something like $5,000, with the doctor's fees for surgery and prenatal care separate. And afterwards, we got a printout of an itemized bill, which they would have sent to an insurer if we'd had one -- and it was several times more. I remember one charge was $9 for a small box of pads. Um....couldn't they do better than THAT, for something available at Walgreens for a buck?

And this was 15 years ago.

I am generally somewhat of a free market fanatic, but I have to admit that when it comes to healthcare, the free market failed....and the burden of its failure is on the uninsured.

I am actually hoping the health bill passes -- I am no great fan of it, and it's got some HUGE problems, but at least it addresses the out-of-control insurance system, which is a good start to what is going to be a long, slow process of fixing a very broken system.