Planned Parenthood helps women — and men too

Planned Parenthood can be added to a long list of groups that the Trump administration has verbally condemned and threatened for expressing their First Amendment rights. 

Since one of their services goes against his pro-life beliefs, President Trump handed the women’s health care organization a hefty ultimatum, saying that Planned Parenthood will continue to see government funding only if the abortions stop. 

Trump wishes to block Planned Parenthood from federal assistance in order to prevent abortion, but the Hyde Amendment of 1976 already took care of that. The law allows government funds to go toward abortion only in the cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger. 

After it was passed, the amendment was challenged in the Supreme Court where it was upheld that “The funding restrictions of the Hyde Amendment do not impinge on the ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment held in Roe v. Wade…to include the freedom of a woman to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy…” 

The government aid Planned Parenthood receives goes not toward funding abortions but instead toward funding critical health care services — such as pap smears, birth control, family planning and HIV testing — for 2.5 million Americans annually. 

The $500 million cut that Trump has cautioned would injure countless lives of both women and men alike. Certainly, Planned Parenthood serves men, too — the very people Trump swore to protect when he took office. For men, the nonprofit provides vasectomies, condoms and cancer screenings, among other gender-appropriate services. 

Whether it’s through information sharing, surgery or examinations, Planned Parenthood’s supply of sexual and reproductive procedures and education saves lives. And it is the low-income patients, men and women, who rely on Planned Parenthood because often they cannot afford their own health care insurance, that would suffer the most were federal dollars to be discontinued. 

If Trump follows through on his threats, that will only increase the rates by which Americans are at risk of unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and several types of cancer.