Michelle Malkin now takes on the cause, and the rhetoric, of the misogynist anti-autonomy movement and its efforts to eliminate accessible reproductive healthcare.

Planned Parenthood is the largest single provider of prenatal, contraceptive, and abortion care in the US. In a country in which over 85% of all counties have no abortion services provider at all, in which health insurance plans are not required to provide contraception, and in which government-provided health programs for the poor are prohibited from providing abortion or, at times, even information about abortion, Planned Parenthood is often the only reproductive health provider available in many communities, and usually the only one available at reduced cost.

This drives the anti-woman brigade screaming crazy. There has been an organized campaign against Planned Parenthood by the sex-negative right wing for years, using a combination of smear tactics, lies, distortions, and political lobbying. Attacks range across everything from Margaret Sanger’s racism (don’t believe what you hear from hypocritical liars), Planned Parenthood’s practices of murder, malpractice, and coverup (don’t believe what you hear from anti-woman liars), and the - in Malkin’s terms - “obscene profits” Planned Parenthood makes from the lucrative business of providing subsidized healthcare to uninsured patients in poor communities (don’t believe what you hear from financially illiterate liars). The reason, of course, is that Planned Parenthood is doing what they are dead set on wiping out: making reproductive autonomy real for the most vulnerable women in America.

Having failed in their campaign to ban abortion, having failed in their attempts to demonize abortion and the women who have them, having failed in their terrorism campaign against healthcare providers, that anti-choice movement has for years now concentrated on making abortion simply inaccessible, even though legal and Constititionally protected. Their tactics range from disingenuous “protective” restrictions that make it impossible for abortion clinics to operate or for women to get to them, secondary boycotts and blocades to intimidate those who fund or do business with abortion providers, and, for years now, an organized campaign of deception aimed at cutting funding to Planned Parenthood. To this end, the organized anti-choice community recycles the same discredited crap over and over, and now have one of the most visible - and visibly crazy - spouting their canned lies for them.

There’s no point quoting Malkin’s stupid, false, and ignorant nonsense about Planned Parenthood. What is important is that she has made herself a tool in a campaign of falsehood to try to cripple the only source of reproductive healthcare for many women in America. The major lie in the campaign is that Planned Parenthood is being subsidized by the government to provide abortions. (”cut the abortion subsidies”, “the tax-subsidized abortion industry”, “what market-distorting results do we get for those government incentives? 289,650 abortions in 2006″) Aside from the bizarreness of an opposition to abortion based on “market distortion”, this is all just false.

Given their wide geographic base and commitment to low-cost care, Planned Parenthood is often the service provider under government contracts for healthcare services for the poor, or for Medicaid services (not including abortion). The money they receive from government sources is not a “subsidy” for any of their activities - it reimburses direct services to patients under Title X and Medicare - the same as would be the case for any other provider, except that, in the communities Planned Parenthood serves, there often aren’t any other providers. And these services are often further subsidized by Planned Parenthood itself from donations. Federal funding is prohibited for abortion in all but a small percentage of cases. Abortion services to other Planned Parenthood patients are paid for out of other funds - they have to be, since the government money is more than used up providing non-abortion services. The claim that the government paid for “289,650 abortions in 2006″ through Planned Parenthood is simply a lie - not a mistake or even an exaggeration, but a straightforward lie. In fact, the federal government paid for virtually no abortions, and the money they did pay was less than required to provide the non-abortion services Planned Parenthood provides. But that’s just the first of the standard lies.

Malkin claims Planned Parenthood earned “$115 million in profits” last year. As a non-profit agency, that would be quite a trick. They did, in fact, receive (almost) that much in revenues beyond their total outlays, as every non-profit agency is allowed to do; like every non-profit agency, they are also required to devote excess revenues to their non-profit work under specified schedules and regulations. They can use it for expansion projects or to provide further services, and can maintain a small percentage of revenues as a “rainy-day” fund. That’s just sound fiscal management (if non-profits were required to spend every dollar every year, they’d go bankrupt the first year they had an unplanned expense), and it is standard for non-profit agencies. But excess revenues are not “profit”. By definition, profit is the property of the shareholders of a business entity; it belongs to them and can be distributed to them as dividends or recouped by them through selling shares as their price goes up. Non-profits do not have shareholders; they do not pay dividends; excess revenues are not extracted by anyone for personal benefit. It’s not a small thing - it’s the heart of the definition of “profit” and of “non-profit entity”. And you’d think that someone who tries to demonstrate what passes among conservatives as sophistication, by injecting the phrase “market distortion” into a discussion of abortion, wouldn’t immediately embarrass herself by proving she doesn’t even know the meaning of the elementary term “profit”.

She goes on to recycle a farrago of vague lies and complaints about Planned Parenthood: two patients in a 2-year period, out of over 6 million patients served and almost 21 million treatments provided in that time, filed malpractice suits against the agency (one was settled for apparently less than $100K; the other has not even come to trial; Malkin describes each patient’s complaint in lurid detail and gives no other information); Planned Parenthood provides confidential services even in cases of statutory rape (yes, and appropriately so); some racists donated money to Planned Parenthood and she thinks that’s the agency’s fault. It’s a bizarre and stupid grasping of mostly made-up straws.

But the - fully foreseen and deliberately intended - consequences of this nonsense are serious. The intent of this movement is to destroy the one agency that provides the bulk of reproductive healthcare services in this country, concentrated among poor women and teens. As the Annual Report that Malkin breathlessly (and cluelessly) cites as the source of her misinterpreted “facts” makes clear, abortion services are only 3% of their annual activity, and almost none of that is reimbursed by the federal government (a minority of states pay for abortions through state Medicaid programs, but this is still a tiny fraction of Planned Parenthood’s revenues). Malkin and her fellow misogyny-jihadists rave about abortion to whip up the red-meat right wing, but what they are really trying to do is cut off all control of pregnancy options for as many women as possible, focusing on the most vulnerable. Prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving federal healthcare money would have almost no effect on their provision of abortion services, and still less on abortion overall in the US - but it would cripple their ability to provide contraception (38% of their annual activity), STI/HIV screenings and treatments (29%), gynecological cancer screening (19%), and pregnancy testing, prenatal care, “midlife” care, and other women’s health services (10%). This is the goal and effect of the campaign of lies, slanders, and disinformation that has been running for years, and that Michelle Malkin has joined. It is a campaign born in hatred for women, contempt for their needs, health, and autonomy, and indifference to their deprivation or suffering. They’ve found themselves a fitting ally.

[This post cross-posted at Sufficient Scruples.]