If we listen to the left, contraception reduces abortions/unintended pregnancies, yet PP data shows just the opposite – a very positive, 80+% correlation between the two and PP increasing abortions when abortions declined nationally. Common sense – contraception is plan A and abortion is plan B (insurance).

If we listen to the left, government funding and PP abortions have nothing to do with each other yet PP data show them 99% correlated – even more than the government funding/contraception link (contraception, for which the government funding is supposedly designed).

The claims of the left are clearly not a case of science over ideology.

Steven T.,

I have just dealt with the fungibility argument, perhaps at such great length you did not read it. To put it succinctly:

(1) Women who have abortions at Planned Parenthood pay for them. Money does not need to be diverted from elsewhere to pay for abortions.

The other tax dollars Planned Parenthood receives come through Medicaid reimbursements and Title X funding.

(2) Medicaid reimbursements (the bulk of the tax dollars that go to Planned Parenthood) Planned Parenthood to pay for services already rendered. You can’t divert payment for services already rendered to pay for other services.

(3) Title X funding pays for family planning services that the government contracts with Planned Parenthood to perform. Those programs are carefully audited to see that the government gets what it pays for.

Consequently, the fungibility issue is irrelevant.

The 99% correlation is meaningless in and of itself, and when you take into account not merely inflation, but the much higher rate of medical inflation, the whole thing falls apart. The “amazingly consistent” number of tax dollars per abortion, when the money is adjusted for medical inflation, comes out as follows:

2000 $950
2001 $914
2002 $973
2003 $912
2004 $877
2005 $831
2006 $816
2007 $822
2008 $770
2009 $753
2010 $735

Recall Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI): “Title X Has Nothing to Do with Abortion.” February 2011. Huffington Post: “Title X, the only federal grant program dedicated solely to family planning and reproductive health services for low-income and uninsured patients, has nothing to do with abortion.” April 2011.

99% correlation and “nothing to do with abortion” are two very different things. Given the Hyde Amendment, I am pretty sure PP and the left do not want to touch the fungibility argument.

david c.,

One of the many problems with the fungibility argument here is that abortions at Planned Parenthood are not free—women pay for them. Consequently, Planned Parenthood doesn’t have to divert money from other sources to fund abortions.

Note the following:

Planned Parenthood’s 2008-2009 annual report states that it received $363.2 million in “Government Grants and Contracts.” . . . However, not all of that money is from the federal government. Planned Parenthood’s government funding comes from two sources: the Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid. About $70 million is Title X funding, Planned Parenthood spokesman Tait Sye told us. The rest — about $293 million — is Medicaid funding, which includes both federal and state money.

Medicaid money doesn’t go to Planned Parenthood to be spent at their discretion. Medicaid money goes to reimburse Planned Parenthood for services already provided. Consequently, Planned Parenthood can’t divert that money to fund abortions. Title X money goes for specific family planning programs that are carefully audited to make sure the government gets the services it is paying for, none of which include abortion.

Here, it seems to me, is how far you would have to stretch the fungibility argument in order to make it apply. Suppose I go to Whole Foods in New York and buy $50 worth of groceries. Suppose you go to a Whole Foods store somewhere else in the country and also buy $50 with of groceries. By what seems to me to be your logic, you could claim that you paid for my groceries and I paid for yours. It would be a claim that no one would take seriously.

If someone gives me five dollars and I put it in my left pocket, and I then pull five dollars out of my right pocket and by a rock of crack cocaine, I can say with a straight face “I didn’t use his money to buy drugs”. But given the principle of fungibility is that in fact the case?

You are painting yourself into a dangerous corner here. If somebody owes you $5, either because he has borrowed it and is repaying it, or because you provided him with something that he agreed to pay $5 for, and if you pay for your illegal drugs even with the very same bill he handed you, you didn’t pay with his money. You paid with your own. If I use my paycheck from my employer to buy illegal drugs, my employer bears no responsibility at all, unless you want to argue that money is so fungible that everybody in the economy pays for everything.

Or let’s remove the example to a publicly funded activity you mayn’t favor…. say defense spending.

Have I ever argued for unilateral disarmament here? While some defense spending is no doubt wasteful and unnecessary, and I oppose wasteful and unnecessary spending, I certainly don’t oppose defense spending.

If you want to argue that Planned Parenthood takes some of the money it is paid for abortions and uses it to pay for Title X programs, and takes an equal sum of money from tax dollars it gets for Title X programs and pays for abortion, then you have the semblance of an argument, although who would take it seriously I can’t imagine. The point is that all of the various services Planned Parenthood provides are paid for separately. The money does not come from one big pot, with accounting gimmicks making it look like government money is not used for abortions. Government money pays for what government contracts with Planned Parenthood to do. It just doesn’t make sense to claim the money is diverted for other purposes or in reality pays for something other than the services it was paid to Planned Parenthood to render.

Surely you recognize the the basic economic principle of “fungibility”? Money is (by it’s nature) a ‘neutral’ means of exchange. Which is to say that every dollar that Planned Parenthood receives from government sources is a dollar that does not need to be taken from other (presumably ‘non public’) funds. Thus, one can maintain the accounting fiction that “no public funds go for abortions” but the moral reality, it seems to me says otherwise.

If someone gives me five dollars and I put it in my left pocket, and I then pull five dollars out of my right pocket and by a rock of crack cocaine, I can say with a straight face “I didn’t use his money to buy drugs”. But given the principle of fungibility is that in fact the case?

Or let’s remove the example to a publicly funded activity you mayn’t favor…. say defense spending. About 24% of the Federal budget goes to defense spending. For simplicity’s sake we’ll just say that a quarter of every dollar paid in taxes goes to the the defense. One could (I suppose) have a check box on the federal tax form that says “I want none of my tax dollars to go toward defense spending”. If that were in place and you were to check said box would you argue in good conscience “none of ~my~ tax dollars go for defense spending”?

“When the 99% correlation is properly considered,” says Riler, “Planned Parenthood’s per-head abortion realisations increase to $1,522 per life, or $501.4m in 2010. . .

That is a completely false statement. Even if government funding correlates 100% with the number of abortions performed, the government money is going for other services. Planned Parenthood does not “realise” any government money by performing abortions.

“Correlation coefficient” refers to the dispersion of the actual data points around the estimated line (also shown on the graph). A “high” correlation means that the actual data are “very close” to the line estimated from the data. This means that the degree of association between one variable and the other is very high.

While the high correlation is interesting, I am unsure about the casual claim, however. I read the author as claiming that a change in the number of abortions causes the change in federal funding. That is certainly a possibility that is consistent with the data.

It is also possible, however, that the changes in federal funding causes a change in the number of abortions provided by PP rather than vice versa. To wit, an increase in government funding for a non-abortion-related activity for PP might free-up non-governmental PP funds that PP could then use to pay for or subsidize abortions. That would account for a high correlation even though the government funding does not go “directly” to pay for the abortions.

Also – assuming that I’m correctly reading what I take to be a regression equation immediately above the upper right hand part of the graph, it appears to me that each $1 million increase in funding results in 770 (769.52) additional abortions rather than the 949 reported in the opening paragraph. But I could be missing something.