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By now, you’ve heard that Americans oppose federal and state legislative efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. Americans, we are told, overwhelmingly believe that the world’s largest abortion business should continue to receive more than a half billion dollars in taxpayer money per year. After all:

No government shutdown over Planned Parenthood, Americans say
“Just over seven in 10 Americans say it’s more important for Congress to avoid a shutdown than to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood…”

Poll: Most Americans Oppose Defunding Planned Parenthood
“The USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that 58% support continued federal funding for the organization, which provides health services, including abortions, to millions of women in the U.S. Only 33% said it should be defunded, while 9% were undecided.”

Now 14 polls confirm that Americans oppose “defunding” Planned Parenthood. But it’s politics as usual in Congress. https://t.co/DsdIOkvkdV

— Planned Parenthood (@PPact) December 8, 2015

Fourteen! Well, I guess all that’s left to do is:

Well, no, because by now, you should also know that if Planned Parenthood and its Maggie-hungry media stenographers are saying it, you shouldn’t believe it.

With polls, it depends not so much on who you ask, but how you ask and what you ask. And when pollsters ask Americans questions that reflect reality instead of Planned Parenthood fantasy, a different picture emerges.

The picture is this: the more people know about Planned Parenthood and the more they know what lawmakers are proposing in regard to funding for women’s health, the more the polls tend to flip.

Of the polls Planned Parenthood cites, each one asks whether Planned Parenthood should lose public funding. Okay. Fair. That is part of the question. But they uniformly fail to give respondents a complete and accurate account of what is being debated. The questions are typically framed so respondents are led to believe that women would be denied access to basic healthcare should Planned Parenthood lose its corporate welfare. (In reality, women have plenty of options.)

Several polls go a step further and ask whether Planned Parenthood should keep its funding or if the government should be shut down in order defund the abortion business. AP/GfK asks “if it would be worth shutting down the government” to defund Planned Parenthood. That’s it. As if that’s ever really been the choice.

The truth is that legislation being proposed on Capitol Hill (recently passed in the US Senate in an historic vote) and the states cuts not a penny of funding from women’s health programs. Instead, existing funds are diverted to the many thousands of high-quality women’s health options which outnumber Planned Parenthood locations by many multiples and which provide high-quality comprehensive care that Planned Parenthood does not.

So what do Americans think when asked: “Congressional Republicans favor shifting Planned Parenthood federal funds to community clinics that perform the same services, but do not perform abortions. Would you say you support or oppose this plan?”

The Washington Times reports that 53.3% support diverting funds from the scandal-ridden abortion business to trustworthy health providers, with 31.5% in opposition to moving the funds. The poll was conducted by Robert Morris University Polling Institute, whose polls have previously “gotten traction on political topics but not this time.”

Other honest polls (absent the scary false choices), conducted since August and ignored by the media and by Big Abortion, ask respondents to react to what lawmakers are actually proposing: diverting funds to women’s health centers whose staff haven’t been caught trying to up-sell baby parts on camera. They show results similar to the RMU poll.

So why would one believe these polls over the Planned Parenthood polls?

RMU pollster Philip Harold explains:

“One of the cardinal rules in polling is to clearly indicate the alternative in the question and a poll question that doesn’t do this is flawed,” he said in a press release. “Because the wording of this poll reflects the actual proposal, it is more accurate.”

But “accurate” is not what Planned Parenthood, one of the major political parties, and the media elite want, is it?

Not when they’re dreaming of a “magical land where abortions…are free” (read: paid for by someone else) while spending $20 million dollars to elect politicians of a party that included a taxpayer-funded abortion plank in its 2012 platform, which surely promises to double down in 2016, and is known by who they “boo” and who they “hail.”