In reality, these folks those same old men who know that things were good for them in the old days when they didn't have to worry about meddlesome women or black people running the country because everyone knew his or her place. I know it may seem a little alarmist to talk like this, but it's true.
Here's evidence: the Family Research Council, the organization that has been spearheading the call to cripple Title X, our nation's only dedicated funding stream for family planning, hosted a panel discussion just this past Monday, after a screening of the film "Demographic Winter." You can see video of the discussion on their site. And here they are, a group of old white men decrying the declining fertility rate in the Western world. They complain that folks have lost focus and that women don't care about families and see babies as "burdens instead of blessings." Of course there is little discussion of how to be prepared to have children, about how to best be able to provide these blessings with all that they may need. They also correlate providing increased social benefits with a declining fertility rate, advocating for a decrease in funding for "welfare programs." Whaaa?? How do you plan to feed these babies? My favorite part of this discussion is the speaker who argues that mandated education programs have contributed to this declining fertility rate. You can see him itching to start a conversation about how we should dismantle public schools.
These folks are not fooling anyone. These attacks to limit access to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services are couched in the fact that they want life to be how it once was -- when they controlled everything. They don't care that the current rules and regulations of Title X are well thought out and compliant with widely accepted clinical guidelines. Even though family planning service providers have never been able to provide abortion care with federal funds, have been consistently audited for potential violations of this provision but have never been cited for violating it, anti-family planning extremists keep calling for even more restrictions on this successful, important, and severely under-funded program.
We cannot afford to ignore those who are adamantly anti-family planning. They are against access to reproductive health care for those who need it most, the low-income and uninsured. Most of the people who receive services through Title X are between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. The extremists endeavor to limit our lives to fit into their narrow world view of how to live, and we can't stand by while they use their political influence to limit our choices. Take a moment, write to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, write to your legislator and tell your friends and family how these people really think. It is our responsibility to push Members of Congress to respond aggressively to politically connected folks like the FRC before they once again succeed in instituting out-dated regulations that restrict our freedoms.
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