Why is the government maybe about to shutdown over...abortion and clean air? What?

The abortion question is Indiana Republican Jihadist Mike Pence's war on Planned Parenthood. A while back, you see, he introduced a resolution defunding Planned Parenthood's participation in federal family planning initiatives (a set of laws that date back to Republican Richard Nixon). These services treat 5 million women a year, about three-quarters at or below 150% of the federal poverty line. Planned Parenthood Federation of America provides, yes, abortion services, but loads of other things: cervical cancer screening, breast cancer screening, general reproductive health. Six in 10 women who visit a PPFA clinic don't have a family doctor. PPFA is it.

PPFA received federal money for these things. It does not allocate any federal money to abortion services. Joan Walsh in Salon today, in response to Pence's statement on morning TV that he'd personally shut down the government over PPFA funding:

Pence is lying, and he knows it. Not a dime of government funding goes to Planned Parenthood to provide abortions. The group has a separate organization, with separate staff in separate buildings, all with private funds, to provide abortion services.

Abortion services, incidentally, account for about 10% of what PPFA does. The rest, as I said, falls in the broad category of women's preventive health. No sane person disagrees that we need more preventive healthcare in the US. One of the truly messed up things about our employer-based healthcare system is the way an individual is passed off from this employer (and insurer) to that one as he changes jobs. In other words, the company that insures the person when he's 28 has zero incentive to provide preventive care because the company knows it is unlikely to be insuring the person when he's 58 - that is, the company won't reap the long-term benefits of shelling out for preventive care. But PPFA doesn't worry about that. You walk in their door, you get healthcare, and you don't pay a thing if you can't.

Defunding PPFA will in fact increase abortions in all likelihood. The group provides family planning and birth control counseling and services for 2.5 million mostly poor women a year. Without that service, does it not stand to reason that some of those women will make the mistake of having unwanted pregnancies, and that they will abort? Of course it does. PPFA calculates that in 2009 it helped prevent 612,000 unwanted pregnancies.

It makes no sense but it's not supposed to. It's just part of a ideological crusade. Pence has been after PPFA for years, and now he's got a cohort of ideological fellow travelers willing to back him up.

I also see this as part of a wider war not only against abortion per se, but against groups that tend to be identified with the Democratic Party and its candidates. PPFA's political activity doesn't amount to huge dollars but of course it's almost all done in support of Democrats.

Not so long ago I had the opportunity to sit down with Cecile Richards, PPFA's president, who laid out the stakes and described the many ways in which GOP success here would damage healthcare for working-class and poor women in the US. "It's impossible to overstate the havoc it will wreak in the healthcare system if they take Planned Parenthood out of women's healthcare," she said. "It's terrible healthcare policy, and it's terrible fiscal policy." This is true too: a dollar of spending on preventive healthcare typically saves $3 or $4 down the road.

It's disgraceful. And I think, and hope, it's stupid politics. I just don't think it would make sense to your average middle-of-the-road person that the budget couldn't pass because of abortion.

But this really is one of those cases where the politics is secondary. Thousands of women a year walk into PPFA clinics, learn they have breast or cervical cancer or some other issue, and have it treated. In Pence world, they won't.

