Dawn Eden, an anti-sex writer with a widely-read blog and a thin skin, has had some sort of obsessive antagonism to Planned Parenthood for some time, and is a leading voice in an orchestrated campaign to cripple reproductive healthcare in America by crippling the single largest provider of reproductive care services, and the overwhelming provider of service to poor women.

Eden is confused on the issues, however, and breathlessly over-excited – and not a little ill-informed – by perfectly ordinary sex-related facts – all characteristic of her approach to the subject.

Did you just pay your state and federal taxes? Good for you! Thanks to taxpayers’ generous funding, Planned Parenthood Golden Gate can afford to make an MTV commercial depicting a young girl going down on her boyfriend under the sheets. . . .

Below are details of the new commercial, straight from PPGG’s Web site, which also enables readers to view the ad online. Note Harrison’s use of Planned Parenthood code words and phrases like “safety,” “prevention,” and wanting to “reduce the need for abortion.” In other words, it’s perfectly OK to encourage teenagers to dive into bed with one another, as long as the goal is to prevent their getting pregnant. . . .

From PPGG’s site:

In order to connect as many youth as possible with reproductive health services and information, PPGG has designed an outreach campaign that includes advertising on MySpace.com, KMEL radio and MTV. It is PPGG’s goal to help teens and young adults make educated, responsible decisions when it comes to their sexuality and reproductive health.

“Our goal at Planned Parenthood is to reach as many teens and young adults as possible with our safe is sexy message,” said Dian Harrison, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Golden Gate. “We encourage everyone, including elected officials, to support access to family planning and comprehensive, medically accurate sexuality education in order to reduce the need for abortion. Prevention is what this campaign is all about.”

Our youth friendly ads focus on safety and prevention. The MTV spot, which starts airing April 15, depicts a responsible, young couple that practices safe sex. It begins with a young woman working with power tools in a hard-hat zone. A female voice-over states, “My father always told me to use the right tool for the right job.” At the end of the day she returns home to find her hard-hat wearing boyfriend already under the covers. She tosses her own hard-hat aside and pulls off her coveralls, stripping down to a “Safe is Sexy” tank top, shorts style underpants and a tool belt. She dives across the bed for her safe sex toolbox, which is well stocked with colorful condoms, courtesy of Planned Parenthood. The ad closes with a shot of the safe sex toolbox and the same female voice-over saying, “Nice tool!”

Actually, she says, “Ooh, nice tool!” As for diving across the bed, she dives all right … [picture deleted] And down she goes — with her giggling face right where her boyfriend’s penis would be. Somehow, she manages to stretch her arm all the way over to the toolbox and open it . . . [picture deleted] …where she finds a candy-colored assortment of condoms, fur handcuffs, oral contraceptives, a rubber glove (perhaps left over from her construction job), and one of those squeezy things used by office workers to stave off carpal-tunnel syndrome.

That’ll give the 12-year-olds who watch MTV something to think about.

And just think, you enabled Planned Parenthood Golden Gate to produce this ad and put it on the air. After all, by the organization’s own 2004 annual report, 53% of its annual income comes from government funds and contracts. The report’s no longer online, but the data may be verified via the organization’s IRS form at Guidestar.org, plus it’s laid out neatly in this graphic that I copied from the annual report when I exposed “A Superhero for Choice” [a previous humorous Planned Parenthood video] . . .

That taxpayer money is fungible — having it frees PPGG to spend more money on advertising than it would be able to otherwise.

The ad is pretty funny (you can view it here) – a female construction worker is shown on the job, then coming home to a man in bed (also wearing a hard hat!). Her coveralls explode off her body (shades of Erica Jong!), and she dives across the bed under the duvet, her head appearing on the far side of the bed where she opens a red metal tool box filled with sex toys, and pulls out a strip of packaged condoms. The entire text – all two sentences of it – is as described by Planned Parenthood above. The word “sex” is not even used. The job-site scene takes up almost half the 30-second spot, and the toolbox is shown for barely two seconds. I had to pause the video to even see what was in it – obviously Dawn Eden did the same thing.

As far as the video goes, we can note first that Eden doesn’t understand most of it or can’t bring herself to deal with it truthfully. For one thing, the woman in the video is clearly an adult, not a “young girl” (she doesn’t look like a girl, and how many young girls work on construction sites?). Also, her face does not go “right where her boyfriend’s penis would be” – it emerges off the bed, from the other side of the covers, immediately after she “dives across the bed” to get to the toolbox – exactly as Planned Parenthood says it does. The video does not “depict a young girl going down on her boyfriend under the sheets” – it simply does not (unless for Eden, “going down” involves some sort of physically implausible and entirely non-sexual procedure – which is possible, given what she also thinks about French kissing). And, finally, Dawn Eden apparently has no idea what rubber gloves could be used for in a sexual situation (which makes me think that her violent opposition to sexual information in any forum isn’t working out so well for her). (I have to admit I didn’t understand the carpal-tunnel toy either, but at least I’m willing to be taught.)

But that’s just the factual weirdness. It’s the entire tone of the piece that is off – and again, characteristically so: her pouncing on a “discrepancy” in the Planned Parenthood video description (“Actually, she says, ‘Ooh, nice tool!’”), the repetition of the shocking (though sadly false) “fact” that the couple is having oral sex (sex-education material should depict couples doing something other than sex? – though again, this appears to be Eden’s actual belief), the particularly loopy claim that she “exposed” a video that was produced for the purpose of public distribution and was on a publicly-accessible Web site – similarly with her repeated implication that she’s pulled of some sort of coup by finding annual-report data that are publicly available by law, or also posted on open Web sites. Like so many sex-negatives, Eden seems to imagine there’s something scandalous about even the most humdrum facts in any way related to sex. She frequently refers to her supposed extensive sexual experience prior to her religious conversion, but strangely displays the same ignorance and breathlessness exhibited by so many other professional prudes.

However, the ostensible focus of the piece is the matter of funding, not the content of the video. Eden claims in several places that “taxpayers” funded the PP video. Her meaning appears in the remark that PP’s fees for service under government healthcare programs are “fungible [and] having it frees PPGG to spend more money on advertising”. This is a distortion at best.

Planned Parenthood does receive extensive income from federal and state governments. It amounts to about a third of their total annual revenues. Some individual Planned Parenthood clinics receive such revenue; the rest do not (PP requires each clinic to operate financially independently, but their financial reports are totaled to give annual figures for the whole organization). The revenue comes almost entirely from fees for health services under Title X of the federal Health and Human Services funding bill, or from state-provided funds through Medicaid. These programs provide reimbursement for reproductive healthcare for low-income women, from licensed providers. PP is the nation’s largest single provider of reproductive healthcare, and one of the few that is available, often on sliding-scale rates, in low-income communities; it is therefore naturally a common provider of care to women who qualify under these programs, and it receives reimbursement for its services to patients enrolled in them. (The federal funding is almost exclusively for contraception and gynecological care. Federal law prohibits abortion funding except in cases of rape, incest, or a direct threat to the woman’s health – and anti-choicers have been doing all they can to remove those exemptions as well. The number of abortions funded under those provisions is negligible. A larger number are funded under state Medicaid programs, but only in the small number of states that provide for it.) So, some of Planned Parenthood’s money comes through healthcare services under low-income care programs, usually to women who would have no other healthcare funding source, and often no convenient source of care, without it. PP’s enemies are dedicated to eliminating this source of care.

But what about the “smut peddling” angle? Are these “fungible funds” undergoing perversion diversion to produce unspeakably hot toolbox vids? Income from government-reimbursed healthcare services is “fungible” only in the sense that the money your grandmother sent you for your birthday is “fungible” – when you put it in the bank, you’re not guaranteed to get the exact same dollars back, only the same amount. But simply putting it into your account doesn’t mean you can buy anything more with it than before. The money received for healthcare services goes to providing those services – it does not “free” any other source of money unless there is something left over as profit. And these fees are treatment reimbursements under Medicaid and a similar program – so notoriously stingy that most private medical practitioners simply refuse to see patients enrolled in them. I would be surprised if PP is making back its costs on this care; I would suspect they’re actually subsidizing it with other donations. I don’t know either way, and so can’t claim any such conclusion with certainty – but I do know, as I state, that this is the type of care almost all other providers have determined is too unprofitable to provide. Planned Parenthood can’t be the only exception. So the likelihood is that there simply is no leftover governmental revenue to be funged into other projects. Whatever the truth of this matter, PP’s critics have produced no evidence whatsoever that there is any such money. They have cited gross revenues from governmental programs, but without mentioning that those programs do not cover the actual costs of services provided in many cases. As for “profits” – who knows? Certainly not Dawn Eden – not that that stopped her from making the claim.

Assuming, however, that they’re hoarding huge amounts of their windfall profits from Medicaid (stop laughing), how much would that come to exactly? Well, as one of the sources above points out, PP posted revenues in excess of expenses (i.e., “profits”, but they’re a non-profit organization) of $35.2 million on revenues of $810 million in FY2004 – a net (?) profit margin of 4.3%. Pathetic for any real business, but OK for a non-profit reproductive healthcare organization in these benighted times. Assuming their “profit margin” from the 53% of their revenue that comes from “government services and contracts” is no higher than the average from other sources (it’s undoubtedly vastly lower), this would mean that at most $18.7 million of excess revenue came from the government. (Again, the real figure is likely closer to zero – or negative.) Now, $19M would certainly have paid for that video, but they didn’t spend that (putative) $19M on the video. Part of it undoubtedly went to operating reserves, most of it undoubtedly stayed in the chapters that produced it in the first place. The video was produced by the Golden Gate chapter of Planned Parenthood – the critics never bother to tell us if that chapter is even one of the ones that gets any government revenue. Now, I don’t know how PP divides its revenues among its chapters (again, they are supposed to be financially independent), but even if they split the entire $18.7 million evenly among their roughly 850 chapters, it would come to only $22,000 each. (And, once again, they undoubtedly didn’t send all of it out to the chapters, and it undoubtedly wasn’t $18.7 million to begin with). I doubt that would have paid for even this low-budget video, even if the chapter spent it all on the project.

In short, it’s barely possible that the government-funded services PP is billing for under Medicaid produced some excess revenue for other PP projects, but it’s even less possible to imagine that revenue came to very much. Technically, if there is excess revenue from the government contracts, it’s true that it would bolster or offset expenses otherwise funded from the other sources of revenue, but it’s a far stretch from that to say that it paid for any particular project, or made a tangible difference to whether this video project was completed, especially given the low amounts of money likely involved. And, again, we still don’t know that the chapter that produced this video even got any such money in the first place. The entire accusation is speculative, and it trades on a thorough ignorance of the actual dollar amounts involved, while throwing around words like “fungible” and charts of entirely different financial issues from PP’s annual report to grant a veneer of financial sophistication.

Finally, to block the maximum 2.3% of its revenue that Planned Parenthood may be getting from the government and is left over above costs, what are its critics trying to accomplish? Shutting down the single largest gynecological and reproductive healthcare source for low-income women in the entire nation. The revenues that Dawn Eden and the rest of the organized opposition are targetting are low-income care programs whose patients most providers will not accept at all – program for patients who often live in areas where there simply are no other providers. They are desperate to cut off this care. (There’s an entire organization called “STOPP” – “STOp Planned Parenthood” – devoted to the issue.) The reason, of course, is that they’re desperate over the entire Planned Parenthood agenda, not a safe-sex video but the entire idea of safe sex – or any sex – and the autonomy that comes with it. Abortion is at the top of their list (to the extent that they believe their own “fungibility” argument – and they may, since they don’t seem to have worked out the numbers – what they want is to dry up a revenue source that could subsidize abortions, not safe-sex ads), and contraception is right after that. The ads mean nothing – like pictures of aborted fetuses, or useless ultrasounds, they’re just something to get the public worked up over. The intent is to cripple an organization that makes it possible for women to control their own sexuality, and gives them sexual options – in fact, encourages them to make their own choices about sexual options – other than those approved for them by the sex-negatives. To achieve that goal, they’re happy to strip reproductive healthcare from hundreds of thousands of women. In fact, it’s a two-fer: those women can’t get their reproductive healthcare choices served, because their providers have been cut off, and the other women taking advantage of PP’s “fungible” government money will also lose out! (In reality, it wouldn’t have much extended impact even if they succeeded. Since the “profit” margin is so low to begin with, and, as I’ve explained, is probably negative on the Title X/Medicaid services in particular, ending those services would not affect the funding for other services, and could actually increase it! All they could achieve is to hurt the poorest women, who need accessible service under those programs to have any care at all. But that’s success enough in its own way for the right wing.)

This weirdness over a funny – and almost content-free – safe-sex ad would be amusing if it didn’t spring from such viciousness. In fact, it’s just one manifestation of a raving hatred for women’s sexual autonomy, and an overt desire to constrain it by hurting those who are already worst off. This unhinged attack on a condom ad – with all its falseness, prudery, and confusion – is a form of whipping-boy redirection of hostility toward women brazen enough to want or need sexual healthcare, and the most vulnerable of them in particular. Apparently, sex-panicked misogyny is fungible.