Mark Twain once said that one should never argue with stupid people; they drag you down and beat you with experience.

Normally, I would just chalk Ms. Cavin’s letter up to sheer ignorance and leave it alone. But in this instance, ignorant remarks like hers can cause real harm, especially in Federal Way where one in 10 residents live below the poverty line, and one out of every four kids don’t complete high school.

These are among the many folks most likely to need essential health care services from Planned Parenthood of Federal Way, which has a clinic very close to my home. Ms. Cavin’s vicious and ill-informed harangue about Planned Parenthood could sway a teenager or impoverished single mom away from seeking needed help – help in accessing low-cost birth control, HIV and cervical cancer screening, pelvic exams, pregnancy testing, vaccinations and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

Yes, Planned Parenthood also provides legal, constitutionally protected abortions, which are funded through private donations. Federal support for women’s health care cannot be used to provide abortions. Indeed, the bulk of the organization’s revenue (75 percent) is spent on contraception and STD testing and treatment. Only $3 of every $100 the agency receives in revenue is spent on providing abortions. Anyone with a teenage daughter in Federal Way (and I’m one of them) ought to be grateful this clinic exists.

Kids have been having sex behind their parents’ backs for centuries. Beating a Bible up side their heads is not going to change that, no matter how hard you pray. I don’t know what Ms. Cavin was up to when she was 19 years old – I applaud her fortitude if she was holding out for marriage.

But in truth, one out of every five women in this country has received services from Planned Parenthood at one point in their lives – including me, my sister, my best friend, my college roommates, my sister-in-law, her sister, my niece and my nephew.

As a college student, my relationship with my boyfriend was my business, not my parents’, and I made a trip to the nearest clinic because I had no intention of derailing my future. In truth, people like Ms. Cavin don’t care so much that Planned Parenthood donates embryos to fetal research, despite their sermonizing rants. Their real complaint is about women having sex for fun and not for procreation.

If these people really cared about the “babies,” they would be picketing the dozens of fertility clinics in this state that discard invitro embryos. In 2013, some 1.7 million excess embryos were thrown in the garbage and some smaller, though no less significant number, were donated from invitro efforts to research into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other debilitating chronic diseases in the same manner that Planned Parenthood donates them.

The reason Ms. Cavin and other Bible thumpers like her focus on Planned Parenthood’s practices rather than the fertility clinics is that the former serve women who refuse to be pregnant, whereas the latter serve women who are desperate to be pregnant. Their real purpose is to sit in judgment of women’s sexual behavior— the “right to life” of a human embryo is just a more expedient moral football.

Ginny Vanderlinde, Federal Way