Just Stop Issuing Statements About Everything All The Time

This is about Planned Parenthood, but really it’s about most progressive organizations

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.