Currently, social conservatives are trying to defund Planned Parenthood. The standard liberal response to this is to point out that abortion represents only 3% of Planned Parenthood services. Ross Douthat pushes back against that noting that they do still perform 250k abortions a year. He goes on to defend social conservatives against the pro-herpes charge.
But telling people who are against abortion that they're "pro-herpes" because they don't support channeling three hundred million public dollars a year to America's largest abortion provider is the equivalent of me accusing a fierce and moralizing anti-theist like Sam Harris of being "anti-education" because he doesn't want his tax dollars being used to, say, fund the Catholic school system. [emphasis mine] The phenomenon of an institution that does good with one hand and evil with another is a familiar one in human history - even Hezbollah does a lot of impressive humanitarian work, I believe - and it does not by any means follow that those who oppose the evil are morally obligated to support the institution anyway just because it does other, less morally problematic things besides.
There’s a rather key flaw in that argument. Namely, that Sam Harris presumably supports public schools. If he doesn’t, than yup, he anti-universal education. So if you oppose abortion but favor making contraception available then this Sam Harris defense works for you. The defense doesn’t work if you: opposes contraception, exclusively support ineffective and dishonest abstinence only education efforts, or try to cut family planning services under Medicaid.
So does the defense work at all? More after the cut.
Douthat does suggest how a pro-life group could also fight against STDs. So, going back to his article on how the pro-life movement didn’t doom the GOP, let’s see if his kindler gentler abortion restrictors are actually doing anything help: [Y]ou’ll find that the bulk of pro-life energy is being channeled into grassroots efforts, from crisis pregnancy centers to post-abortion counseling… Over the same period, pro-lifers — especially in the evangelical community — have broadened their movement’s ambit, emphasizing poverty, the environment and other non-abortion “life issues” more consistently than an earlier generation did. Leading pro-life figures like Rick Warren are more likely to be photographed touring poor nations alongside Bono than protesting outside abortion clinics. Apart from its Supreme Court appointments, the Bush administration policy most influenced by pro-life sentiment was probably its AIDS-in-Africa initiative. Okay, good on the “life issues” but the only disease prevention effort is AIDS-in-Africa. PEPFAR, which often funds programs through religious organizations, has come under criticism for promoting faith-based ideology over science, emphasizing abstinence programs and giving inaccurate information about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV transmission. Payne [(D-NJ)] says such concerns have been allayed in recent years, and he and others credit PEPFAR with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Now allaying those concerns took a lot of work by Dems, but I’m willing to write that up as a compromise win. Credibility on disease prevention means going for domestic programs like the reformed PEPFAR. They’ll compete with Planned Parenthood far more effectively if they can offer the family planning and disease prevention efforts on their own rather than complaining about how others provide it.
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