What would Missouri lawmakers do to end abortion? Anything except what it would take

Those Missouri lawmakers are a bunch of drama kings, waiting until the last possible hours of the last possible day to renew approval of the completely routine tax on hospitals, ambulance runs and pharmacies that funds Medicaid in our state.

Had they not done so, Missouri would have had to make up for the more than $4 billion in lost revenue with deep, across-the-board cuts in state spending. Health care for the poor, the disabled and the pregnant is such a trivial matter for some of the not-poor and not-pregnant guys who run our state that they can’t even work up the will to pretend to care.

What they do care about, though, is defunding Planned Parenthood. In a state where 50 surgical abortions were performed last year and zero have been performed so far this year, why would that be? In the Planned Parenthood clinics here that perform no abortions at all, why would defunding lifesaving services like cancer screenings and yes, birth control, be considered pro-life?

First, of course, because the “pro-life” lobby that funds the “pro-life” legislators says so.

Missouri Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden, a Columbia Republican, said a lot of things in a Facebook post about this whole near-disaster that I agree with, and some other things that I don’t.

“Some in the Senate and in various outside interest groups claimed that the bill that we passed was ‘pro-choice’ in nature,” he wrote. “This is a willful and ignorant distortion of the truth and of facts. There is nothing ‘pro-choice’ about funding care for the elderly, pregnant women and the disabled. In fact, the ‘anti-life’ stance would be those willing to pull the rug out from under these vulnerable groups with no intention, and no plan, to account for the loss of those critical services in the name of achieving a short-term, political victory.”

Yes, yes and yes.

“For the last several years,” he went on, “we have added language to every budget we have passed that basically says none of the dollars we appropriate can go to abortion providers in the state of Missouri — namely Planned Parenthood. Let me be clear — I believe Planned Parenthood is an evil organization whose founder was one of the more despicable, racist individuals to ever achieve any sort of notoriety in our country. So the notion that we could/should defund Planned Parenthood is an idea I fully support.”

I don’t know about “most despicable,” but Margaret Sanger was in fact a big proponent of selective breeding, or eugenics. At the turn of the last century, the idea of keeping “mental defectives” — and often one qualified for this designation simply by being Black and/or poor — out of the gene pool was widely accepted. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit,” said Sanger. “That is the chief issue of birth control.”

For many years, supporters of choice denied the truth about Sanger, but I no more excuse her as a product of her time than I do any of the Confederate traitors whose statues most of our Missouri representatives in Congress just voted that we should continue to honor.

The harm that eugenics did can scarcely be overstated. As “Caste” author Isabel Wilkerson told NPR last year, “Books by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich.”

I do not, however, agree with Rowden that there’s anything “evil” about funding clinics that provide mammograms or STD tests. In fact, it’s refusing to do so that strikes me as immoral.

Even Parson, who signed one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws, said in a recent interview that he couldn’t believe his fellow Republicans would risk the state’s economy over a pretend problem. “I’ve just never seen anything like this,” he said. “We’re leading the nation in fighting abortion and it’s like we’re almost looking for a problem to create.”

Almost. And since Republicans really were willing to risk the state’s economy to keep Medicaid from paying for certain forms of birth control, it’s almost like they don’t want to acknowledge that Sanger aside, birth control prevents abortion.

Of course, Missouri women are still ending pregnancies in other states, and in their own homes, with “self-managed” RU-486 abortions.

And as the pro-life New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote in April, if abortion were ever really outlawed in the United States, the massive infusion of social funding needed to make a complete ban work by doing a lot more to support women and families “would require a different Republican Party than the one that exists today.”

If you really hated abortion so much, gentlemen, then you’d think that through.

It’s a lot cheaper and more politically advantageous, though, to take on Planned Parenthood instead. So now Parson, who enables the same Midwestern ayatollahs whose fundamentalism so amazes him, has promised to do that.

“Leaders in the Missouri House and Senate are working closely with Governor Parson to put a REAL plan in place to, once and for all, defund Planned Parenthood in the state of Missouri,” Rowden said in his Facebook post, adding that he hopes this effort “actually deals a knock out blow to Planned Parenthood. I am one ready to give the knock out.”

Then on to funding the child care and mental health and addiction services and other programs that it would take to make abortion unnecessary, right?