Defunding Planned Parenthood is a terrible idea. I urge your readers to contact Dave Reichert to tell him do not defund Planned Parenthood.

Consider some facts:

Planned Parenthood provides low-cost or free health care serving millions of people through 650 clinics across the country. They provide reproductive education, reproductive healthcare and primary care to the most vulnerable of our population.

If this program is defunded, it will cut off services to people who cannot afford or access health care otherwise. Community health clinics will not be able to absorb these people. Therefore they will go without care.

Planned Parenthood is the largest sex education source in the country. They provide access to reproductive information to millions of people who may not have access to accurate information otherwise.

If you support a vote to defund, how are you going to support to the children whose parents cannot take care them? What extra thing are you personally going to do to support kids who are abandoned because their mothers did not have access to free or low-cost birth control?

I suggest you make an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic. See what they are providing to the people in our district and the country.

Pay attention to who is using this program. Take the bus too, put yourself in their shoes. Then think about their faces when services are cut for them.

Lastly, if abortion really sticks in your craw, remember, it’s not funded by federal dollars anyway.

Barbara Beattie

Snoqualmie