Congress recently voted to defund Planned Parenthood, approving a bill that would cause the health care provider to lose roughly $450 million every year that they otherwise would’ve received as funding from the federal government. As expected, President Obama vetoed the bill, which sent it back to our mostly Republican-led Congress, which doesn't have an adequate number of votes to override the veto.

Congress initially voted on a bill to defund Planned Parenthood very recently after alleged shooter Robert Dear, killed three people and wounded others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The passing of the bill in Congress also comes after a video from a right-wing, anti-abortion group went viral, claiming that Planned Parenthood illegally profited from selling “baby parts”, which abortion patients could opt to donate for scientific research. That being said, that video failed to bring up any evidence, and even after questioning the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, for five hours, GOP lawmakers failed to find genuine reason to defund the health care provider. Subsequently, several states across the U.S. launched investigations into their own Planned Parenthood affiliates, all of which have turned up empty.

According to a profile of the 114th Congress, done by the Congressional Research Service, our current Congress is the most diverse it’s ever been, but is still over 80 percent white and 80 percent male. In contrast, roughly 20 percent of all American women have visited a Planned Parenthood before for services, and nearly 80 percent of all patients at Planned Parenthood fall under the federal poverty line. That means that most all of Planned Parenthood’s patients are vulnerable, underprivileged women. It is both ironic and terrifying seeing how a relatively small group of almost exclusively white men can control women’s health and their access to reproductive services in this country. What’s even more ironic, is that although many of the GOP lawmakers who grilled Cecile Richards about the health care provider’s perceived wrong-doings involving abortions and the illegal sale of fetuses, defunding Planned Parenthood literally does nothing to affect these issues.

Planned Parenthood cannot use federal funds to perform abortions, and the money used to do so comes from patients’ healthcare insurance, private donations, etc. So in defunding a prominent health care provider, Congress isn’t reducing the amount of abortions being performed, but is instead taking away health care services provided to young, low-income women and families.

More irony here: Only 3 percent of all services offered by Planned Parenthood are abortions, which are safe, accessible, and legal in this country, might I add. The vast majority of the services offered by the health care provider includes STI/STD testing, contraception, cancer screening and prevention, and other women’s health services. That includes nearly 400,000 Pap tests, 500,000 breast exams, and 4.5 million tests and treatments for STIs/STDs, including 700,000 HIV tests.

According to Planned Parenthood, their services help prevent an estimated 516,000 unintended pregnancies every year. More recently, Colorado’s teen birth dropped 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, due to a program aimed at offering long-term contraceptives to low-income women. In just 2010 alone, the state of Colorado saved over $42 million in health care costs associated with teen births thanks to the program. So what would happen if health care providers like Planned Parenthood, or programs such as the one recently implemented in Colorado, did not exist? Would we really see less abortions, or just a lot more unsafe, illegal procedures being performed behind closed doors?

When looking at these statistics, it’s clear that contraceptives and other services provided by Planned Parenthood and other family planning programs result in fewer unwanted pregnancies, and thus fewer abortions.

Regardless of the decreasing number of abortions where these clinics and programs are located, it should be noted, again, that abortion is legal. Whether you are pro-life or not, abortion is a legal procedure, and women in this country are entitled to making their own decisions about what’s best for their reproductive health care. Abortion has been legal for over 40 years, since the famous

Roe vs. Wade case. But abortion itself has existed for centuries, dating further back than 1550 BCE, where methods of a procedure are described in the Ebers Papryus, an ancient Egyptian medical text. In the unlikely event in which the government manages to overturn Roe vs. Wade, we’d likely see abortion rates skyrocket.

In some Latin American countries, where abortions are illegal and include prison sentences of up to 30 years for women, the abortion rates are four times that of rates in the U.S. Cheap, black market abortions occur everywhere, but more commonly where safe, legal abortion isn’t accessible, or is so costly that it isn’t an option. An estimated 80,000 women die every year from these “back-alley” abortions, and that number likely doesn’t include the amount of women affected by infections, and other, often times painful, complications that these procedures entail.