Just Stop Issuing Statements About Everything All The Time. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

Dec. 8, 2023

9 - 11 minutes

Earlier this week, Planned Parenthood tweeted and posted a statement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Here it is:

    On October 7, Hamas unleashed a brutal attack in Israel, killing over one thousand civilians, sexually assaulting women and girls, and kidnapping over 200 people, many of whom remain captive. 

    Planned Parenthood unequivocally condemns the atrocities committed by Hamas, and rape as an act of war in any conflict. Our work is rooted in ensuring that health care is accessible to all and creating a world where people, families, and communities can survive and thrive. We believe that all people should have a right to bodily autonomy, freedom from violence, including sexual assault, and the right to humanitarian aid during times of war and crisis. These values hold true whether those families live in the U.S., or abroad; in Israel or Gaza. 

    The war against Hamas in Gaza has now killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including many women and children, and resulted in a humanitarian crisis in which the people of Gaza lack access to much needed health care, food, water and other aid. We believe that reproductive and maternal health care is a human right and must be provided at all times – including during periods of violence and war. 

    Now is the time to stand together against hate in all its forms. Planned Parenthood patients and supporters with loved ones in Israel and Gaza are traumatized and grieving, while also experiencing rising hate and intolerance toward Jewish and Muslim communities in America. As the fighting in Gaza continues, we call for all parties to protect civilians, especially women and children, and to forcefully condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia, in the U.S and around the globe.

If you click around you’ll see that a bunch of people are mad at Planned Parenthood about this statement, in some cases for silly online reasons, such as the grotesque denial that Hamas committed acts of rape during the attack (would that mark the first time in recorded history young men rampaging and killing their way through the territory of their enemy didn’t rape women? Historians, chime in on this cheerful question in the comments section!). You won’t get any links from me, as I don’t want to focus on online idiots. Instead, I want to focus on the question of whether organizations need to stop releasing so many damn statements all the time.

Now, I guess read from one angle, the statement itself is. . . fine? If it had been issued by a sitting member of Congress, I would have shrugged and said, Eh, that sounds about right. Or at least, it’s about the best you can do when trying to issue a pithy statement about an exceptionally complicated and tragic conflict that has not only caused fault lines in U.S. progressive politics, but fault lines filled with magma, and the magma is swarming with homicidally violent magma-proof sharks.

Who should issue statements, and on what? Depends. A sitting member of Congress, for example, represents a group of Americans and votes on issues involving things like how much money Israel should get from the U.S., how much aid the Palestinians should get from the U.S., and so on. “Issuing statements on Israel/Palestine” is definitely in their job description. For a sitting member of Congress to say “This doesn’t really have anything to do with me” would be both craven and stupid.

But it wasn’t a sitting member of Congress who issued this particular statement. It was an organization that provides abortion, contraception, maternal healthcare, transgender medicine, and other services to Americans, largely to lower-income ones. While it’s true that some of these issues intersect with the present plight of the Palestinians getting displaced and battered relentlessly within Gaza, in the sense that the Gazan healthcare system, depending on who you ask, is either on the verge of collapse or already has collapsed, and pregnant Palestinian women trapped there are presently — this is the medical term for it — pretty fucked, the conflict over there isn’t about Planned Parenthood’s core issues in the fundamental manner you’d expect to have inspired the group to issue a statement.

On top of that, it’s weird for Planned Parenthood to suddenly express an interest in Palestinian women’s access to “reproductive health care” in Gaza, which mostly means abortion. Unless this article from 2019 is out of date and there was a successful surge of pro-choice activism in a territory controlled by a murderous Islamist group, there isn’t really any abortion access in Gaza (or the West Bank): “Article 8 of Palestinian Public Health Law No. 20, which was passed in 2004, states that in the West Bank and Gaza, abortion is prohibited by any means unless necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, as proven by the testimony of two specialist physicians. Written approval from the pregnant woman and her husband or guardian must also be provided, and these records are kept for a minimum of 10 years. [citations omitted]”

If Planned Parenthood were concerned about Gazan women’s access to abortion, which is of course a worthy cause as far as I’m concerned, it could have at any point decided to chime in on that subject. After all, Planned Parenthood Global works to “Grow the locally led, globally connected movement for safe abortion and sexual and reproductive health and rights.” But a Google search reveals no meaningful prior mentions of Gaza on the part of anyone from Planned Parenthood Global or its parent organization (Global doesn’t have its own website, so that search should be comprehensive). 

There are legitimate reasons why Planned Parenthood might have chosen not to have said anything about Gaza in the past. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply fraught, and organizations make politically informed decisions all the time about when to statement and when to shut up. If Planned Parenthood suddenly started talking about Gaza during a period when the conflict was cooler than it is today, people would say things like “Why are you suddenly so concerned about Gaza? Why not focus less on whether women there can get abortion and more on whether they can come and go as they please, or have enough water?” And Planned Parenthood Global’s model of finding on-the-ground partners seems unlikely to work in a place like Gaza — it seems like it would be an exceptionally dangerous place to do this sort of work.

So I don’t think it’s a knock on Planned Parenthood that the group has effectively ignored this very small, reproductive rights–denied region in the past. But now it has inserted itself into the conversation, in a way that comes across as strange and opportunistic and clumsy, given the full context, not to mention very late — while there was one prior statement issued October 16 by the organization’s president, it was almost contentless.

Why did Planned Parenthood do this?

While the arguments against issuing a statement like this don’t really depend on any particular theory about why it happened, I would bet a significant sum of money it happened because angry young lefties within Planned Parenthood demanded the group chime in, and/or because the organization experienced some sort of external pressure from angry online lefties making the same argument. The view that all forms of oppression are connected, that every group should be about everything, is predominantly held by young lefties, after all, and angry young lefties — with Twitter accounts, or overactive organizational Slack accounts, or both — are the ones who tend to demand organizations issue statements when they arguably shouldn’t. What I’m saying is that it’s very unlikely fifty- and sixty-something lifers at Planned Parenthoods with decades of experience working within the reproductive rights space, learning how to compromise, grappling with setting up offices in red states, et cetera, were the ones pushing for this.

But in much the same way veterans of Planned Parenthood probably believe something like It’s really unfair, the thing about women in Gaza not having access to abortion, but there’s not really much we can do about it, and we have finite resources and political capital, the organization could have decided that of course it cannot contribute meaningfully to a debate about a brutal conflict thousands of miles away that has not only divided America, but Democrats — that is, its own donor base.

Because I hang out with a disproportionate number of media and nonprofit types, I keep having conversations with them about whether the most toxic aspects of progressive politics from 2020 and 2021 have passed. My view, which I have expressed before, is that the pendulum has swung back toward normalcy — I wrote a bit about this a bit recently — but that in some pockets, the angry young radicals still hold an arguably unhealthy amount of sway. I think this might have been one of those instances. I hope Planned Parenthood takes an honest look at the fallout from this statement and factors that into its future decisions about when to speak and when to remain quiet. And I hope other progressive organizations do the same thing, and maybe, like, issue fewer statements?

Questions? Comments? A statement about this newsletter? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. Image: “Abundance of Colorful Paper Speech Bubbles on Blue - stock photo” via Getty.