Planned disappearance of women
The head of Planned Parenthood, in the New York Times yesterday, breast-beating over the racism of Margaret Sanger:
What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation.
No, I don’t know Karen. What I know is this stupid new trick of blaming women for things like racism and pasting belittling nicknames on us at the same time. What I know is this filthy habit of throwing women overboard and patting yourself on the back for doing it. Planned Parenthood can go fuck itself.
And then there are the organizational Karens. The groups who show up, assert themselves, and tell you where to march. Those who pursue freedom and fairness, but also leverage their privilege in ways that are dehumanizing.
So groups are Karens? So women are to blame for everything?
And sometimes, that’s how Planned Parenthood has acted. By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color. And when we focus too narrowly on “women’s health,” we have excluded trans and nonbinary people.
Wo. That’s a kick in the face. What’s with the scare quotes? Is women’s health a joke now? Is it a stupid mistake? Is it something that doesn’t exist? What is it doing in scare quotes?
And what the hell do they mean “too narrowly”? Women get to have some things for themselves! That’s the whole point. Women are generally treated as an afterthought and given scraps after all the good stuff has been allotted to men; we are allowed to have some things for ourselves.
As the nation’s leading provider of sexual and reproductive health care with a presence in 50 states, Planned Parenthood has an obligation to change how we operate. We must take up less space, and lend more support. And we must put our time, energy, and resources into fights that advance an agenda other than our own.
Bye, wims, sucks to be you!
Uhhh…no.
The reason for an organization like Planned Parenthood to exist is to advance its own agenda. If you want to advance some other agenda, then find some other organization advance it. (I’m sure there’s one out there.) Or start you own.
This is senseless.
Truth.
Especially in the cases where those other agendas are directly in conflict with the organization’s stated purpose. This is the most infuriating aspect.
I wonder if this wholesale embrace of other people’s agendas, most particularly the trans agenda, has had a net positive or net negative in popular support for PP. (Ditto the various other organizations doing similarly.)
Oh, so for example those organisations which issue solemn denunciations of people that don’t agree with TRA theory?
What is this fucking drivel? Women’s health is foundational to the organisation’s existence.
This is a puzzler. If an organisation caters to a particular agenda, then that is its agenda. This announcement is openly stating that PP is changing agendas away from women’s health, you know, the issue for which it was founded.
Defund Planned Parenthood? I’m not sure if I’m joking or not…
Yet another organization I have ruined. I’m unstoppable!
If this happens, then we need to start a new organization to actually promote women’s reproductive health.
It makes my eyes bug out all over again today.
Who is expected to say such a stupid thing other than women?? No one. Not one fucking one. It’s just women who are expected to give way, to step back, to sit down, to wait, to serve, to shut up.
It’s just grotesque.
I also suspect that PP has had a strong net positive in the lives of women of color. Without the organization, many of them would have no place to turn. If there are individual clinics or staffers turning away people of color or putting them at the end of a long waiting list, that is fixable by training, by altering procedures, by removing those people from their position.
Too many people have poisoned the well. At what point in our post-modern, post-feminist, post-reality world did women’s health become an issue of white women? And what the fuck makes it now something that must focus on men?
Is this person talking themselves out of her own job? I’ve heard of mission creep, but this is mission vapourization. I’m sure there are other women willing to step in who could do it better, or at all. Maybe this is actually an instance where a women should step aside and sit down to make room for someone else, in this case a woman who knows, upholds and prioritizes women’s needs.
Leana Wen’s resignation in 2019 as the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood was over a dispute about what PP’s priorities should be, with Wen believing in a wider approach to reproductive health that also appealed to those who were opposed to abortion. It seems now that PP’s priority is to support a wider campaign of social justice that’s pointedly politicized. Here’s Wen’s story about her departure from PP from the NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/sunday/leana-wen-planned-parenthood.html
Well, “wider,” but also narrower, since it’s now shoving women away.
Well, they are “widening the bandwidth of how to be a woman.”
Here’s a thought. Maybe, just maybe, if you want to advance agendas other than your own the best way to do that is to get the fuck out of the way and let the people for whom the fight is more than just an agenda get on with the job.
For some reason this reminds me of the Portlandia sketch where after a five minute discussion the men’s group decides they have “solved feminism” and really should let the women know.
What this crap always reminds me of, time after time, is the episode of “Northern Exposure” (tv show from the 90s) when the characters did a baby shower for Shelley and hipster radio talk show dude Chris talked hipster stuff about getting in touch with his female side and one of the women told him irritably, “That’s easy, go out and cut your salary in half.” I wish there were a YouTube clip of that, I’d share it often.
That’s ACLU *and* PP, burning their bridges with women, and with me. And NOW. No more support.