Planned Parenthood Article Analysis

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Not only are the services that Planned Parenthood offers due to funding vital, but the effect on sexual health and general wellbeing has been immense. Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor at Wake Forest University, mentions in her article, “The War on Women’s Futures,” that due to the access women have had to contraceptives:
Women in America have significantly reduced the number of children they bear. This decrease in fertility has been particularly striking among white women. Fewer white women marry, most marry much later than in previous generations, far more get divorced and the size of their families has decreased dramatically. Along with these changes, white women’s educational achievement has soared, their participation in the workforce
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The article continues to state that, not only have women been able to have increased opportunities outside of the home, but there has been an extreme decrease in the number of unwanted pregnancies: “by 2002, moreover, only 9 percent of births were unwanted, compared with 20 percent in the early 1960.”. Also, in 2011 alone, Planned Parenthood tested and treated over 4 million people for sexually transmitted diseases, performed 750,000 breast exams, and conducted 770,000 Pap tests. Birth control access since the 1990s has closed the income gap vastly as well, by about 30%. Not only this, but there has been a 60% decrease in maternal deaths since Planned Parenthood has made family planning easily accessible (Protect Women’s Health”). The crucial services available as a result of Planned Parenthood have demonstrated immense increases in women’s health and opportunities outside the home. Ultimately, Planned Parenthood has been a major component in the propulsion of the women’s rights movement due to what it provides for the female population. Essentially, the impact that Planned Parenthood’s services have had on the overall health and welfare due to federal funding has been tremendous since the clinic’s doors opened a century …show more content…
Zerlina Maxwell, writer for Essence magazine, begins her piece, “Protecting Our Reproductive Rights,” by giving the example of a woman in Texas in need of an abortion. This woman already had three children, and presumably was unable to take care of a fourth, thus she was forced to drive 150 miles to the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic, not to mention a 24-hour wait. The majority of women who need to use Planned Parenthood for its accessible and cheap services are low-income; to be specific, 79% of women are 150% below the poverty line (Covert and Konczal). For this reason they are unable to take enough time off of their job to take a multiple-day trip to get an abortion or simply to get a sexual health screening. Low-income women of color not only face the struggles of racism and sexism daily, but also have to deal with limited body autonomy due to government officials striving to terminate funding, a majority of whom have never needed the inexpensive clinic. Nancy Gibbs, a TIME magazine managing editor, in her article, “The Baby and the Bathwater,” shares several interviews with women who have needed Planned Parenthood in the past, one of which is Jackie Speier, a California