4

Birth Control Is Crazy As Hell

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Birth control isn't just pills. There's a patch, there's a shot, there is a metal rod that gets implanted in your arm, there is a copper T-shaped device that is implanted into the vagina, there's a sponge, and probably some kind of voodoo curse, if you're into that sort of thing. Most of these methods work via flooding the body with hormones. Witch doctors are notoriously hit and miss, but the rest of those options work great. Sometimes at the cost of your sanity.

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"To be fair, it's hard to get pregnant if you confine yourself to an asylum room."

3

The Protesters Are Completely Ridiculous

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Despite what Fox News tells its viewers, we are not responsible for 114 percent of abortions. In fact, less than seven percent of the services my office provides are abortion-related. Nationwide, abortion services are only about three percent of what Planned Parenthood does. We spend more time on prenatal care -- assisting pregnancies so that babies are born healthy -- as well as fertility treatments (so babies are conceived in the first place). We also do STI exams, pap smears, cancer screenings, birth control, and a pretty decent Christopher Walken impression.

2

Everybody's Got an Agenda

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There are groups that work tirelessly to discredit Planned Parenthood. I'm not talking about rival birth control clinics in some sort of genitalia-based Karate Kid scenario -- these are oppositional forces that dislike us for political reasons. So we have to be extremely defensive and protective about everything we do. Any customer might be somebody with a hidden camera, waiting for their "gotcha" moment.

In one case, an activist got a Planned Parenthood employee to ask for a bribe in order to help a (phony) pimping ring obtain services. That employee was immediately fired, and shortly afterwards it came out that Live Action, the activist group in question, spent months visiting clinics in six states before they found one crooked employee. It might not have even mattered if they came up totally empty in their pimp-quest -- sometimes they just doctor the audio in their recordings so that it seems like they actually caught something notable. It's like your fishing trip coming up a bust, so you buy one at the supermarket and tell everybody you caught it yourself, packaging and all.

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"She was a fighter, but you don't fish for 20 years without learning a few tricks."

It's not all political maneuvering. We also have spurned lovers who'll call in, trying to get their exes' test results. We have people blaming their STD test results on us. Guys have seriously told me on the phone that they are trying to sneak their girlfriend a Plan B and they want advice. I disconnect those calls, because we have not yet developed the technology to punch a man in the dick through the telephone line.

1

The People Catching STDs Are Not Who You Think

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Most of our patients are 20-to-32-year-old women. They're usually single, sexually active, and very knowledgeable about their bodies and basic genital science. But then there are people outside that age group, those irresponsible horn-dogs boning it up left and right, despite rampant STDs and unplanned pregnancies. You know who I'm talking about:

Senior citizens.

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"I didn't have any protection when I took the beach at Normandy; why would I need it for this?"

There are so many old people having sex. Turns out that The Golden Girls was more documentary than comedy. STDs among the elderly have doubled in the last decade. We do a lot of pap smears and tests on elderly women, and issue a ton of birth control to them. Yes, geriatric pregnancy is a thing that happens. My clinic finally had to stop offering abortion services to anyone over 55, because those are so much more complicated and dangerous that we just couldn't afford to keep doing it. This isn't only a problem for my weird little clinic in Freakville, California, either. Over in the UK, the number of abortions for women over 40 has risen 30 percent in the last fourteen years.

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Hey, they call it menopause, not menostop.

Robert Evans is Cracked's editorial manager, and you can follow him on Twitter.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Things You Learn Escorting Women Into an Abortion Clinic and 7 Things You Only Find Out as a Lawyer to the Poor.

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