Planned Parenthood provides health care services to women who cannot afford it otherwise. Each year they provide nearly 4 million STD tests, 1 million screenings for cervical cancer, and 830,000 breast exams. Their family planning services help prevent hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies every year.PP receives about 323 million dollars a year of the 3.69 trillion dollar federal budget, none of which is used for abortion services. Follow this link to a great interactive budget chart. See if you can find the budget for Planned Parenthood.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?src=tp
What? You can't? That's because it's a drop in the bucket. Cutting programs like PP or any cuts that do not involve the National Defense, Social Security, Medicaid, or Income Security cuts, is like throwing a thimble of water at a house fire. (in fact it's more like throwing gasoline on the fire, because without PP services, things get worse!)
Critics of PP propose cuts because they believe the abortion services provided by PP are immoral. However, the Federal Budget is not meant to be a "moral document." Rather, it is a distribution of limited resources against unlimited wants. (remember, this is the whole purpose of politics!) When you approach politics from the court of morality, you find moral absolutism. (the Taliban is a good example of this!) It does not allow for compromise. Yet, the American system can only work with compromise.
