The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

It's never made a great deal of sense to me why so many self-described Christian conservatives have ardently fought to defund Planned Parenthood. Granted, the family planning facility does provide abortion services, however, only 3% of their spending goes to these procedures, while 97% of it goes to improving women's health and preventing the need for abortions. The Texas Policy Evaluation Project furthered my perplexion regarding the matter, as they recently released a study proving my point. After the Lone Star State stripped Planned Parenthood of its funding in 2013, here's what happened: - 35% decline in IUD and implant claims - 27% spike in births One of the authors of the study, Amanda Jean Stevenson, said this about their findings: "The U.S. continues to have higher rates of unintended pregnancies than most rich nations, and we know that U.S. and Texas women face barriers as they try to access preventative services. It's a public health issue that ...

Typically when I comment about Facebook memes, it's because they're lacking in accuracy, have gone viral, and I feel the need to fact-check them. The polar opposite was true of a recent such post I read, which I felt was so brilliant, I needed to share it. It was posted in light of the recent mass shooting in Oregon, and while he claims the original post was not his quote, writer William Hamby ( http://livinglifewithoutanet.wordpress.com/) previously wrote something very similar to it: "Or, hey, how about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion -- mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a str...

The Christian right's growing problem of lying about Planned Parenthood continued on Tuesday morning, as the Republican-led Congress continued their witch-hunt on the family planning organization by holding a hearing with its president, Cecile Richards. During the hearing, Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz showed and described a chart to Ms. Richards, which was titled, "Planned Parenthood Federation of America: Abortions Up - Life-Saving Procedures Down." Before writing more about this chart, I'll allow you to look at it for yourselves: http://www.vox.com/2015/9/29/9417845/planned-parenthood-terrible-chart The x-axis shows the years between 2006 and 2013, while the y-axis shows the number of cancer screenings & prevention services as well as the number of abortions. As you can see, Mr. Chaffetz's chart started out fairly accurate, as it clearly showed that in 2006, cancer screenings & prevention services (2,007,371) were much more prevalent among Pl...