“The Wine-Sipping Butchers of Planned Parenthood” titles an article by TownHall.com, criticizing Planned Parenthood’s actions regarding a highly edited video that makes it appear that Planned Parenthood executives are trying to sell the parts of aborted fetuses. (townhall.com)

According to The Hill, “In a 48-page report, Attorney General Bob Ferguson rejected claims that Planned Parenthood has performed partial-birth abortions or that any of its clinics sell fetal tissue for profit ‘rather than simply recovering costs.’ [They] found no indication that procedures performed by Planned Parenthood are anything other than performance of a legally authorized medical procedure.” (thehill.com)

One associates the name “Planned Parenthood” with controversy and a various opinions, but many of these opinions and controversies stem from inaccurate sources.

Yes, Planned Parenthood provides abortions, but that procedure is only one of more than 20 other services that Planned Parenthood performs. Many American people are not aware of this fact. The government gives a yearly amount of $500 million to the corporation, and not a penny of that money is spent to fund abortions.

Planned Parenthood does not use any tax dollars to pay for the abortions and out of all the services they provide, only three percent of their services are abortion-related.

Planned Parenthood offers a wide variety of check-ups and procedures that have absolutely nothing to do with abortion. They perform cancer screenings, STI/STD tests, provide contraception in all its forms, sexual education, pregnancy tests and even men’s health services like vasectomies and screenings for testicular and prostate cancer (plannedparenthood.org).

The fact that politicians are out to defund this institution is erroneous. Planned Parenthood saves lives. All the women in America that can not afford private healthcare use this institution as their main provider for women’s health purposes.

It’s not a matter of being pro-choice or pro-life, it is about being pro-health.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, designated as a day to give thanks and appreciate our fortunate lives, Robert Lewis Dear demeaned the holiday and inflicted gun violence upon a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs on Nov. 27.

The victims whose lives were lost in the hateful act were courageous people: a police officer, a mother supporting a friend, and an Iraq war veteran.

The saddest part of this horrible hate crime is that the victims weren’t even taking part in the act that drove him to open fire on Planned Parenthood in the first place: abortion. It’s ignorance like this that takes the lives of innocent people if more people were aware of what Planned Parenthood truly provides.