Planned Parenthood is having a rougher time than it once did. Fifty or so clinics have closed due to financial difficulties associated with defunding from the government.
Not to worry! As reported in the New York Times — a California clinic is offering cosmetic procedures to help keep the doors open.
First, the Times’ reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta, describes the core mission of PP clinics. Notice what she leaves out:
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Nationwide, Planned Parenthood, which provides birth control, preventive sexual health screenings, prenatal care and primary care for millions of patients, many of them on Medicaid, is facing enormous challenges. These include significant cuts to Medicaid reimbursements, increased costs of treatments and staffing, and a “hostile political environment,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. …
Faced with deep federal funding cuts designed to target the country’s best-known abortion rights organization, the affiliate’s health clinic in Sacramento expanded its services, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, to include cosmetic Botox injections and intravenous drips for hydration to help keep the lights on, said Dr. Laura Dalton, the chief medical operating officer for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte. The decision, she added, was based on the affiliate’s uncertain financial sustainability as well as feedback from its patients.
Well, at least the A-word was finally mentioned.
Mixing beauty interventions with what is supposed to be women’s health care has its critics:
But that move has been criticized for conflating healthcare with beauty treatments: But there was something particularly dissonant about introducing cosmetic procedures, Ms. Yost said, because it seemed to suggest to patients that they needed to be beautified, which initially felt like an “antithetical message” for a clinic focused on women’s health.
That conflation of health and beauty at Planned Parenthood gave pause to Jessica DeFino, a beauty critic and author of the Flesh World Substack newsletter about beauty culture. For health care to incorporate beauty trends, she said, lends the scientific, rational sheen of medicine to the unrealistic cultural expectations placed on women and “gives people a sense of permission to indulge.”
Gupta reports that one PP supporter called the program, “Botox for a good cause.” My left ear. PP is all about money, killing unborn babies, and from my perspective, fueling cultural degradation. I have little doubt that one day it will get into the assisted suicide business too. As Shakespeare might put it, a plague on all its houses.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exeptionalism.
