Elizabeth Nolan Brown doesn’t understand why social conservatives are pissed that Indiana Planned Parenthood is giving away gift cards:
Unless all the folks wringing their keyboards about it are way stupider than I think they are, they’ve got to realize that Planned Parenthood offering gift certificates is going to do absolutely nothing to increase the rate of abortion (which they ostensibly care about lowering). As I mentioned in my post on Ladyblog Tuesday, only about 3-5 percent of PP services are abortion-related anyway; the majority are actually aimed at preventing abortion (by preventing unwanted pregnancies), with the rest devoted to basic women’s health services (mammograms, pap smears, etc.). If anyone is actually going to purchase and give out Planned Parenthood gift cards, it will probably be, say, women’s shelters and charitable organizations that want to help low-income women obtain contraception, STD testing, or basic gynecological care.
Although this point seems lost on the Pope, contraception helps prevent abortion.
The Dish 