I warned you.
No and no.
Thanks for the compliments and for the
really long quote. What I wrote about FactCheck.org was true then and it remains just as true today. However, just because someone is biased doesn't mean the information they have is worthless or should be summarily dismissed out of hand simply because of that bias. All it means is their information is given a clearer context, and it should be treated within that context. For example, Fox News. Just because they're biased doesn't mean every single thing they broadcast is worthless. Their opinions might be, and how they spin the fact might be, but the facts themselves are not worthless at all. The same holds true for FactCheck.org and even the wacko Media Matters and others on both extremes.
I never billed it as an unbiased article (they did, tho), I simply offered it up as a means for you to read the factual contradictions between what was actually said and what was edited out and what was reported and believed at face value by too many people.
I don't disagree with any of that, but I agree most vehemently with your conclusion. It's entirely possible that PP is playing accounting games to show a loss on the tissue donations, since we know they are playing games with the accounting of federal funds already. But they aren't making much money on those transactions. There really and truly are considerable costs in handling, preserving, storing and transporting human tissue in a manner that it remains viable for research.
Abortion is a thoroughly nasty business regardless of whether they sell the tissues to recoup the costs of obtaining them and keeping them viable for research or just throw them in a hefty bag and into the dumpster. Those who are anti-abortion and particularly anti-PP will have problems with whatever is said in the edited or the raw videos, but the bottom line is the edited videos are largely nothing but lies and were edited explicitly to tell the lies they wanted to tell in the most powerful way they could come up with. It backfired. And I guarantee you they don't care. These are people who have bombed clinics, so getting caught in a lie isn't going to change the way they do things or their goals.
Planned Parenthood’s 3 percent figure has been gobbled up by the media and liberals (redundant, sorry) as proof positive that Planned Parenthood isn’t really about abortion. But if you take even a cursory look at Planned Parenthood’s own data, that claim begins to stink like the load of crap it is. Depending on where you get your numbers, Planned Parenthood performs somewhere between 27 and 40 percent of ever abortion performed in America. Even at the low end of 27%, that's a significant market share, if you will. Ford or GM would kill for that. The fact is that 51 percent of Planned Parenthood’s yearly clinic income, their only self-sustaining revenue source other than federal money and the private funding, comes from abortion, more than 300,000 abortions.
They state they performed "11 million services during nearly five million clinical visits." If that's true, then their abortion numbers start to creep, jump actually, to more than double at 6.6 percent of clinic visits were for abortions. In other words, 6.6 percent of all visits to Planned Parenthood result in an abortion.
Looking closer, Planned Parenthood claims that all those “services” it provides only go to 3 million women. So by it’s own admission, 11 percent of the women that visit a Planned Parenthood clinic in any given year obtain an abortion there. (They did refer people for adoptions, though, a whopping 0.0076 percent of the time). The math on their prenatal services shows unambiguously that they had just over 5,000 prenatal clients and performed an average of 6 prenatal services per client, versus well over 300,000 abortions. So either they're plugging in wrong numbers that contradict each other in the annual reports, of they're criminally incompetent.
According to PP's own annual reports, over the last 8 years their income has exceeded their expenses by an average of $90 million a year. PP doesn't provide much in the way of women's health other than abortion, despite their claims. They don't even provide mammograms. They'll tell you where you can go and get one, but they don't do them. They don't do them because performing mammograms are expensive. Most of the "other" services on the laundry list they perform are rather cheap to perform, many being listed as separate services even though they are part of the same service. They are also not a significant primary care provider in general. In their own recent reports, Planned Parenthood acknowledges that it provided primary care only to about 19,700 of its 3 million unduplicated clients. And these services have been trending downward for years.
No, abortion is their business model, and they need as much money from the government as possible to do it, which is why they claim they can't operate at all if their taxpayer funding goes away. If you really look at the revenue, they end up getting a little more than half their income from taxpayers. That's why they can't operate if that money dries up, and it's why their 3% number is a load of crap.
If you don't consider anything else, consider the fact that Obama and Congressional Democrats are willing to shut down the government if Planned Parenthood is defunded. That alone should tell you that it's probably worth defunding.
