This is a story about protecting the fetus until personhood, and the woman never.
Planned Parenthood helps poor women with reproductive health care. It provides essential cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. It aids with contraception.
It also offers counseling and referrals on abortion choice. And it directly performs abortions.
Planned Parenthood says abortions amount to 3 percent of its services nationwide. Another study says that one in 10 women served by Planned Parenthood gets an abortion.
Because it has locations across the country, and because no other single abortion-providing clinic or organization does, Planned Parenthood gets a conspicuous designation, one decried and deplored by anti-choice and anti-women's rights conservatives: It is the nation's leading abortionist.
That makes it public enemy No. 1 for those anti-choice and anti-women's rights conservatives.
They believe women exist as impregnation receptacles and baby-producing vessels and conveyances. They are determined to protect fetuses until these fetuses emerge from the womb into actual personhood.
At that point these anti-choice and anti-women's rights conservatives start giving mom a hard time about receiving Medicaid. They deny her family and medical leave.
Her child, you see, has graduated from the protected fetus state to the unprotected state of actual birth, and thus is now merely collateral damage.
Some of these anti-choice and anti-women's rights conservatives--Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio, for two--say a woman's responsibility as a receptacle and vessel and conveyance applies even if she isn't a woman, but a girl, and the impregnator is a relative and rapist. Another Republican presidential candidate, Scott Walker, seems by a recent statement to prefer sparing the rapist's incestuous progeny instead of the girl if it comes to that choice medically.
Please understand that federal and state laws disallow public money for most abortions. But Planned Parenthood typically receives federal and state money for other services, through Medicaid along with contracts and grants.
The anti-choice and anti-women's rights conservatives argue that the money all goes in the same bloody pot and that taxpayers are essentially being made to pay against their will for killing babies.
So now Planned Parenthood is being cut off from Medicaid in four of our more anti-women jurisdictions, including Asa Hutchinson's ever-meaner Arkansas.
That's because of a mostly orchestrated and overblown orgy of outrage over heavily edited videos in which Planned Parenthood officials talk about being paid for fetal body parts with what turned out to be right-wing-hired actors executing a trap.
So on Friday, Hutchinson ramped up his recent campaign of obeisance to his right-wing base. It is a political undertaking that has had the governor knowingly throwing thousands of eligible Medicaid recipients off the program. Now he has given Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma a 30-day notice of Medicaid termination.
It is entirely possible that Planned Parenthood will thrive in Arkansas without Medicaid and that the state's poor women will continue to receive services there or elsewhere. Grandstanding seeks only cheers, not substantive results.
Meantime, there are two points that must be made, the first of which is that those videos are mostly shams.
Sarah Kliff is a former Washington Post reporter who writes about health care for Vox.com. She has viewed the 12 available hours of unedited video and authored what I consider to be the most credible and fair-minded assessment I've seen.
She writes that Planned Parenthood officials emphasize time and again in the videos that they are not seeking profit from fetal organs, but only defrayment of costs, and then only if the women receiving the abortions want to have the organs shared, and then only because the organization appreciates the health-care gains resulting from medical research sometimes availing itself of fetal organs and tissue.
But she also writes that not all Planned Parenthood officials are the same. She said one appeared willing to negotiate prices without simply relying on actual costs. She wrote that another offered to talk to a surgeon about changing an abortion method mid-procedure if the different procedure would harvest higher-quality organs, even if the patient had been advised only of the original procedure.
That does not remotely prove profiteering from the sale of fetal parts. But it is evidence of Planned Parenthood's need to fire a couple of people or get those people set straight quickly.
The second point is that the federal government has advised states that they may not arbitrarily purge a qualified Medicaid provider like Planned Parenthood.
Federal policy is that Medicaid patients deserve ready access to all qualified alternatives.
So there will be litigation, no doubt, in Arkansas and elsewhere.
But that suits the anti-choice and anti-women's rights politicians. The grandstand value remains intact.
And they might always get a judge who shares their view that the unborn matter but actual female persons not so much.
John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/18/2015