In 2021, Alexis McGill Johnson, CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which she addressed one of the most pressing issues facing the organisation: whether it was a bit too Karen-y.
Karens, you may remember, are always weaponising their trauma, complaining to the manager and doing all sorts of other whiny, white woman-y stuff that detracts from the real issues of the day. “What we don’t want to be, as an organisation, is a Karen,” wrote McGill Johnson. Part of this threatened Karen-ness involved focussing “too narrowly on ‘women’s health’” (her scare quotes), in ways which “excluded trans and nonbinary people”:
As we face relentless attacks on our ability to keep providing sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion, we’ve claimed the mantle of women’s rights, to the exclusion of other causes that women of color and trans people cannot afford to ignore. […] In doing so, we’re failing in our mission to care for all the communities we serve.
It was an odd announcement, even at the height of Karen-shaming. To be fair, I’ve never run an abortion rights non-profit, but back then I couldn’t help thinking that centring women (a term which, apparently, doesn’t include “women of color”) shouldn’t be your biggest worry. Then again, maybe I couldn’t see the long game. Five years later, let’s check in on how things are going.
Have we seen a move to a broader focus on reproductive justice? Has Planned Parenthood found a way to channel Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body, allowing its politics to “encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy”, and embracing “the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child” while also acknowledging “that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power”?
Well, not really. On the contrary, in a move that will surely please middle-aged Karens everywhere, some Planned Parenthood centres are now offering cut-price beauty treatments.
To be fair, they’re not actually calling them beauty treatments. According to the website of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, which has 30 centres in mid-California and Northern Nevada, what’s being offered via Botox injections are “aesthetics”, which makes it sound like support in embodying the Platonic ideal as opposed to some trashy tweakment beloved of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. And why, the site goes on to tell us, should such support not be available to everyone? Isn’t that what true justice means?
“PPMM treats our patients as whole people and feeling good about oneself shouldn’t be exclusive to only those who can ‘afford’ certain kinds of health care,” we are informed:
For many patients, access to aesthetic health care is essential to their wellbeing. […] Aesthetic treatment is a legitimate area of health care, yet is persistently stigmatized. There are many circumstances where aesthetic treatment in a non-judgmental environment significantly improves well-being.
Frozen foreheads for the masses! End the Botox-hate!
As an added bonus, revenue from injecting poison into the faces of clients — and, as a future option, offering “dermal fillers that add volume to some body parts such as lips and cheeks” — will make up for a shortfall in funding, which can then be invested in other, more traditional projects. Win-win! “Feel good. Look good. Do good,” say Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, in a slogan which could sound like it is associating physical perfection with moral superiority — not great if you’re trying to shed your eugenics movement associations! — but is actually just reassuring you that “taking this step for yourself also means supporting sexual and reproductive health for folks in your community” (which you could just do by making a donation, seeing as you’re already the kind of person who has money to spare for Botox, but let’s not go into that).
This is not the first time that US feminism has found itself in a rather complicated place due to the relationship between choice, healthcare funding and the beauty industry. In 2009, the National Organization for Women aligned with cosmetic treatment providers to oppose an additional tax on wrinkle-reducing injections (dubbed the “Bo-Tax”) to offset the cost of health reforms. NOW’s reasoning was that “middle-aged women are struggling to compete in the job market, and cosmetic surgery can help them appeal to employers”. If society punishes women for getting older, it was, NOW suggested, a double punishment to make them pay extra for trying to counter discrimination. NOW did not base its arguments on “a woman’s right to choose” (back then, it was cosmetic surgery giant Allergan who appropriated that slogan). Their line was more that this was a necessary evil. According to reporting at the time, plastic surgeons were branding the proposal the “soccer mom tax” (this was before Karens were a thing).
17 years later, far from feeling outraged at the very idea that women’s insecurities should be leveraged to fund necessary healthcare, Planned Parenthood is all for it. This is because it “fits with a larger mission of promoting bodily autonomy”. That is, if you believe in a woman’s right to end a pregnancy, how can you question her right to luscious lips and no more frown lines? Aren’t they the same kind of thing? I guess they are if, like Alexis McGill Johnson, you’ve reached the position that focussing on “women’s health” — the health of female human beings — is too damn problematic. Having embraced gender identity ideology, Planned Parenthood can no longer defend reproductive choice on the basis that the control of women as a sex class is fundamentally linked to reproductive control. They have robbed themselves of any analysis that connects the denigration of older women, young girls, infertile women and childless women to the control of what they see as “pregnant people”. All they are left with is the claim that all choices made about the body — any body — are equal.
Planned Parenthood is letting down women and girls
The state of Planned Parenthood dismays me not because I am anti-abortion; I am in favour of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. This is because I know pregnancy is a hugely significant, life-changing, life-risking event. It is not like having the latest tweakment. Reducing it to a choice akin to having a bit of Botox is trivialising. Indeed, if I genuinely believed the two were similar, I would be anti-abortion. I don’t think you have to consider a foetus to be a fully-formed person to feel that maybe, for the sake of even a potential, not-quite-formed person, it’s worth forgoing something as utterly frivolous as a beauty treatment. But pregnancy isn’t like that. The trouble is, to make this case you have to recognise all that is unique about female bodies, female reproduction and the relationship between foetus and gravida. If you have decided that to recognise any of this is exclusionary, you have nowhere left to go.
In associating abortion with “aesthetics”, Planned Parenthood is letting down women and girls. Can they really make enough money from their treatments to compensate for the removal of any last vestige of a meaningful feminist politics? The irony is, right now they’ve never looked more like a bunch of Karens. Feel good. Look good. Do good. I mean, seriously? Is this late-nineties Oprah? It makes pussy hats look like high-level political discourse. Desperate women — desperate for change, not baby-soft skin — really deserve better than this.
