What Would Happen if the U.S. Defunded Planned Parenthood? - Pacific Standard
So why do politicians keep calling to end support for something so many Americans use? In 2011, NPR reported that part of the problem is the organization’s size: While Planned Parenthood is a big provider of contraceptive and other preventative health care, it’s also the nation’s most prolific abortion provider, accounting for one in four abortions performed in the U.S. Although federal funding already does not go to abortions—conducted at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else—it seems that one-in-four figure rankles some abortion opponents enough that they want to throw out the entire enterprise.
But why is the organization is so huge? Perhaps only a big organization could have survived the legal challenges Planned Parenthood has withstood—many in connection to its willingness to perform abortions—over the last 30 years. Up until the 1970s, abortion rights enjoyed majority and bipartisan support among Americans, as the New Yorker reports. That changed with the second Nixon Administration, and, in the 1980s, “opposition to abortion grew violent,” Jill Lepore writes. As a result, “fewer and fewer places were willing to provide abortions, which made Planned Parenthood, in many parts of the country, the last abortion provider left standing.” Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of its services went toward other reproductive care.
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