NYTimes

Because here’s the thing: The cultural consensus in favor of contraception and contraceptive access in this country – in favor, that is, of Milbank’s view of family planning policy, and Marcus’s, and Linker’s, and Saletan’s — is really very, very strong. Separated from the abortion question, as a pro-contraception argument alone, their argument would mostly be a political winner. Yes, many conservatives oppose certain forms of public funding for birth control on limited-government grounds; yes, many religious conservatives fear that contraception and abortion are bound together in a kind of socio-cultural unity, in which no matter what happens on the margins with this program or that one, in the aggregate acceptance of one necessarily feeds the prevalence of the other. But whether or not those fears are justified (here’s my provisional case for why some of them might not be), those combined conservative sentiments matter politically, and increasingly so, primarily because the pro-contraceptive case is wedded, and intimately, to pro-abortion politics. And they would have much, much less influence over our health care debates if the contraception-providing institution constantly defended by liberals as the embodiment of All That Is Worthy of Support were not also … an industrial-scale purveyor of abortion!

So let’s be clear about what’s really going on here. It is not the pro-life movement that’s forced Planned Parenthood to unite actual family planning and mass feticide under one institutional umbrella. It is not the Catholic Church or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or the Southern Baptist Convention or the Republican Party that have bundled pap smears and pregnancy tests and HPV vaccines with the kind of grisly business being conducted on those videos. This is Planned Parenthood’s choice; it is liberalism’s choice; it is the respectable center-left of Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus and Will Saletan that’s telling pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike that contraceptive access and fetal dismemberment are just a package deal, that if you want to fund an institution that makes contraception widely available then you just have to live with those “it’s another boy!” fetal corpses in said institution’s freezer, that’s just the price of women’s health care and contraceptive access, and who are you to complain about paying it, since after all the abortion arm of Planned Parenthood is actually pretty profitable and doesn’t need your tax dollars?