A logic against abortion, and specifically Planned Parenthood, that boils down to “killing babies” is not new to me, though. It scares me that I’ve heard this propaganda stated near-to-verbatim by people whose brains I trust and love. Last month, I sat down with Madeline, my 21-year-old sister. We talked about everything that siblings who are also very tight friends do: fast food, jobs, clothes, pit bull mixes, love, family, sex. These last three topics came together when, offhandedly, I mentioned something that I guess sounded favorable about Planned Parenthood.

“You LIKE them?” Maddy asked, looking shocked and chagrined

“Yeah, of course I like Planned Parenthood. They help a lot of people who need it. How do you feel about what they do?”

“They abort babies when they’re, like, fully developed—and sell their body parts,” Maddy said. “It’s horrible. They kill babies. You believe in that?”

“You watched those videos, too, huh? They were awful—they made me sick,” I said. “Can we talk about what we actually saw in them, though?”

I imagined many people had had similar discussions to ours since July, when the first in a series of videos made by an an anti-abortion group calling itself “The Center for Medical Progress” and smearing Planned Parenthood came out. The former organization claimed to prove that the latter performs abortions in order to sell fetuses. After pulling up statistics on my phone showing Maddy that only 1.4 percent of legal abortions are performed after 21 weeks of pregnancy, and only in cases where pregnancy poses extreme health risks, we looked into the facts: Planned Parenthood’s doctors donate tissue to scientific research groups, and fetal tissue has been used to develop vaccines and other cures for diseases. Planned Parenthood does not profit from this arrangement. They receive small sums from the groups they work with in order to pay for only the transportation and related costs of getting samples from clinics to labs intact.

You’d never know this from watching the video, in which two members of the CMP posed as a scientific research group looking to receive tissue donations from Planned Parenthood. In secretly shot footage, they lasso Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, Deborah Nucatola, into discussing the organization’s policies about medical donations. The video was edited so that all of what she says appears to be the fees that Planned Parenthood needs per sample—$30 to $100, which is just enough to cover those costs we talked about earlier—without including the rest of her context, making it look like Planned Parenthood is selling what many commentators referred to as the babies’ “body parts” for profit. (The CMP has since released the full, unedited video, but it’s not the one that went wildly viral.) She goes on to say, “Affiliates are not looking to make money by doing this. They’re looking to serve their patients and just make it not impact their bottom line.” In regular-person language: Planned Parenthood’s goal is to donate tissue without losing money. “No one’s going to see this as a money-making thing,” Nucatola continues.

On that tip of “No one’s going to see this as a money-making thing”: OH MY GOD, DEB, HOW I WISH YOU HAD BEEN RIGHT. The highly edited footage and pursuant commentary from anti-abortion politicians characterized Planned Parenthood as the opposite of what it is: Instead of a hugely needed source of support for people whose lives would be debilitated or even threatened without the healthcare Planned Parenthood gives them, it was (and continues to be) portrayed as a bloodthirsty, money-snatching band of monsters selling the “body parts” of babies. I felt gross just WRITING that sentence—it’s a horrible concept. Thank god it is not what’s actually going on.

This is not what many people will tell you, though, despite what the facts are. At a debate between Republican presidential candidates in September, multiple speakers claimed that Planned Parenthood “murdered” babies, even after it was clear that footage of a stillborn baby had been erroneously presented as “harvested” by Planned Parenthood in order to inspire hatred against them. How disgusting is that? And it works: Last month, after the Colorado Springs attacks, the CEO and President of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains, who oversees where the shooting took place, said, “We’ve seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months. That environment breeds acts of violence. […] We should not have to live in a world where accessing health care includes safe rooms and bulletproof glass.”

Compare that statement to the rhetoric of current Texas Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who, in response to the shootings, chose to try and pin Dear’s homicides to trans people. Days after the shooting, he lied, “We don’t fully know the motivations of this deranged individual,” and continued, “We know he was a man who registered to vote as a woman. The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when, at this point, there’s very little evidence to indicate that. […] It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and transgendered leftist activist, if that’s what he is.”

Cruz used hateful rhetoric to wrongfully associate trans people, who are already intensely discriminated against, with terrorism that was actually based in extreme pro-life beliefs, regardless of any verifiable knowledge of Dear’s gender identity—which is NOT to say that it matters in the slightest, but that certain conservative interest groups’ propensity for lying about these issues is boundless. The politicians who use the “proof” of the videos’ fabrications are so often the same ones who blithely and aggressively fuck up on race, class, and gender in their messaging and legislative actions. To push the CMP’s misinformative drivel as fact in order to capitalize on the hearts of people who simply do not want to hurt children, no matter the human or sociological cost of at-risk identities and classes, is mesmeric in its moral bankruptcy.

The vitriol about who’s profiting off of defenseless life is being lobbed at an organization trying to provide for those who are hurt and oppressed by the very people whose actions are hurting and oppressing them—not to mention working against their own supposed interests. The estimated number of abortions circumvented thanks to Planned Parenthood’s prevention of unwanted pregnancies, per year, is over 217,000. That is what people attacking clinics are actually attacking, in addition to rights and justice and human life: Abortion prevention.

The kind of reasoning behind this display of hatred has never been about “the babies.” If it were, politicians and their supporting constituents who oppose abortion wouldn’t undercut and preclude legislation that provides childcare for poor families (blocked), prevents child hunger (blocked), and public programs funding education (rather, check out this total gut-wrenching partytime of a bill where the GOP has tried to drastically cut federal funding to the 33 biggest school districts, with the biggest populations of black and Latino students). If it were truly about protecting infants and kids, Republicans would throw their weight behind any number of child-helping initiatives instead of killing legislature that aids or nurtures them.

So if it’s not about the babies…what is it about? It’s about the money, and it’s about the women. Namely, it’s about disenfranchising and controlling poor and nonwhite women by taking away the services that help elevate their quality of life while leaving them bereft of support systems.

This means agitating for “reproductive justice,” a term which means the ability of all people to access equal health care and have the right to safely decide their own treatments for their own bodies, can never succeed if that movement is not intersectional to its core. In a recent interview, the writer and editor Doreen St. Félix brilliantly reframed the intersection of these issues by calling attention to institutionalized racial violence: “Police brutality is a reproductive health crisis. If pro-choice means the right to have children, then it should also mean that those children should be able to live. I’ve found that black and brown women […] are positioned such that we know what unaffordable childcare, poor housing, red-lining, unequal employment, and the list goes on, can take from health.” In looking at health-based justice, we need to see that the privileged people who are curtailing reproductive well-being for women are curtailing lives that they deem irrelevant to their power in so many other respects, and that needs to be a part of the conversations we have about this.

In this present moment that is so fraught with dominant groups vying to decimate everyone else’s rights, it can be hard to know where to expend whatever amount of energy you have when it comes to issues that are called “political,” but are in fact frightening, tangible threats against real people. The solution is not co-opting voices and social justice movements to the singular goal of talking about one medical procedure (abortion), no matter how important it very much is, but working together to see where all kinds of reproductive health initiatives and so many other social issues connect to and can lift one another, as Doreen St. Félix did in that interview. This means looking critically at the quality of life, safety, and dearth of resources for all people, and recognizing the role of organizations like Planned Parenthood within that. There’s a lot to talk about here! No matter what your beliefs are, you deserve to have those conversations based on facts. ♦