When political candidates speak about “women’s health,” and accuse opponents of threatening women’s “access to health care,” they mean one thing: abortion. But there are many health issues that are especially important to women.
For aging women, there is osteoporosis, with susceptibility to fractures. Of course, women have most of the same problems that men do: strokes, heart attacks, cancer, and so forth. Younger women need maternity care and gynecologic care.
Where does a woman go for pelvic pain, menstrual problems, prenatal care, sexually transmitted infections, birth control, mammography, or general health problems? Care is available in physicians’ offices, emergency departments, urgent care, and community health clinics. STIs can be treated at the public health department. Mammography is done by imaging centers.
The one thing you can get at Planned Parenthood and not in these other places is an abortion.
Except for dispensing contraceptives, sometimes of dubious quality, Planned Parenthood provides very few of these services. And it does not offer ongoing care with a trusted physician. If a woman desires counsel on an important decision such as abortion, “her doctor” will not be at the abortion center. Her only contact with the abortionist may occur when her feet are in the stirrups.
Questions for candidates:
- Do you favor freedom for women to choose an insurance plan that does not require them to fund other women’s abortions?
- Do you favor freedom for women to obtain life-saving or life-enhancing treatments such as joint replacement outside the system—or should they all be subject to the system’s utilization controls (rationing)?
- Do you favor tax funding of Planned Parenthood, or should government “healthcare” funding go only to entities that are not in the abortion business?
- Do you favor the freedom of health professionals to decline to participate in abortions and still be allowed to practice their profession?
