Planned Parenthood supporters like to pretend that the organization’s rasion d’etre is something other than abortion. “I shouldn’t have to point this out, but I guess I do: abortion is not funded by the government, by law,” wrote The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent earlier this month. “Saying ‘abortion should not be funded by the government’ as an argument for forbidding women to get health services from Planned Parenthood is like saying that because some supermarkets sell beer, food stamps shouldn’t be able to be used at supermarkets, even though food stamps can’t be used to buy beer.”

The idea that the federal funds Planned Parenthood gets aren’t fungible and that there’s some sort of strict firewall that keeps your tax dollars from subsidizing abortion is as laughable as Sargent’s analogy is daft. If this is true, Planned Parenthood will happily agree to a third-party audit clearly demonstrating all of the federal funds aren’t subsidizing abortion, right? This assertion also relies on the notion that Planned Parenthood can be relied on to act honorably. Call me crazy, but when your organization has been caught on tape helping pimps make trafficking underage girls look “as legit as possible,” maybe they don’t get the benefit of the doubt about following the law or looking out for “women’s health.” And just last week, Planned Parenthood was caught lying about how its Texas facilities didn’t participate in fetal tissue research after they were caught on tape by the Center for Medical Progress picking out baby parts out of a dish and bragging about their long history of selling them.

It’s also worth noting that Planned Parenthood is by no measure the largest provider of “women’s health care” in the country. There are more than 9,000 community health care centers in the country, compared to 700 for Planned Parenthood. And the organization and its supporters have brazenly pretended that the organization provides health care services that it doesn’t in order to make Planned Parenthood seem more needed than it is. President Obama himself claimed that “there are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for not just contraceptive care; they rely on it for mammograms.” But Planned Parenthood doesn’t do any mammograms — none at all. There’s plenty of ways to offer women’s health services without making women rely on abortion providers.