Unbound at the Planned Parenthood Book Sale

Filling My Cart for a Good Cause in MAGA’s Crosshairs

The 52nd Mary Jane McCord Planned Parenthood Annual Book Sale | Credit: Courtesy

If you were to ask my loved ones to name my two favorite pastimes, they would undoubtedly pause for a moment to consider their options. Surfing would certainly come to mind, since I sneak away several times a week to get my fix on the Gaviota Coast whenever there’s swell. Also, cooking with produce from Santa Barbara’s many fabulous farms might make this list since I burn through nearly all of our expendable income every Saturday at the farmers’ market downtown. Trail running, yoga, and crosswords may also be in the mix.

But in the end, I’m guessing all of them would say:

Agitating for women’s rights.
Buying more books than I could ever read in my time here on Earth that clog up the arteries of our house to the point where an ankle sprain is inevitable and needing to excavate one of our children from a fallen mound is likely.

Not necessarily in that order.

It is a treasured rarity that I get to combine both of these passions into one, glorious morning at the annual Planned Parenthood Book Sale.

I must admit, I am a Joanie-come-lately to this Santa Barbara tradition. But I can’t be blamed. Before moving back to my childhood home, I lived in Manhattan, where I haunted Public Library deaccessioning sales on the weekends. Indeed, these opportunities to buy books that were alternately rare and excellent, as well as downright odd and ridiculous, were one of the things I missed most about that isle of joy, as Rogers and Hart once called it. I still have my copies of Sixth Sense: ESP Impressions and a first edition of Three Great Women, by one of America’s founding feminists, Alice Hubbard, from these salad days of careless book collecting.

So when someone told me about the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, I couldn’t quite believe the news. Nor could I fathom the event’s scope and scale. Though they had told me it was at Earl Warren, I assumed it would be at some small venue, a tucked-away corner for a few bibliophiles to mingle.

But when I arrived at the Exhibition Hall, I finally understood the true meaning of “like a kid in a candy store.” I absolutely could not control myself. Indeed, the only thing holding me back was my inability to carry all the books I so desperately wanted to buy.

Luckily, the following year I had the foresight to bring my utility cart. Problem solved.

But my overspending is more than a balm for my chronic bibliophilia. It is one strand in a lifeline for tens of thousands of women in Santa Barbara County, with all proceeds benefiting the Planned Parenthood Central Coast. At one time, yours truly included.

In college, my female friends and I relied on Planned Parenthood not only for birth control, but also as a place we knew we would be safe to ask any questions we had and get the care we needed. When my roommate’s pro-life boyfriend refused to use birth control and then dumped her when she got pregnant, I took her to Planned Parenthood to get the reproductive care — and the counseling — she needed. When the birth control I was taking made my hormones go haywire, I went to Planned Parenthood for advice and alternatives, getting both in spades.

Millions of girls and women have relied on them, and continue to rely on them, for the same and far more. Perhaps even more valuable is the peace of mind of knowing there is a place you can go in an hour of dire, incredibly personal need and be welcomed, cared for, and valued as a human being.

So, of course, MAGA put Planned Parenthood in its crosshairs.

The utility cart filled up fast | Credit: Courtesy

While it’s easy to assume that their attacks on a woman’s right to choose only affect so-called “red states,” cutbacks have roiled reproductive care in states even as solidly blue as California. In 2025, Trump’s Big Beautiful (Murder) Bill temporarily blocked Medicaid reimbursements for large nonprofit health clinics that provide abortions. No matter whether the patient seeking care had an abortion or a Pap smear.

Since 80 percent of California’s Planned Parenthood patients use Medi-Cal, the state version of the federal Medicaid, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers lost tens of millions of dollars in funding. Even though Governor Newsom allocated $90M in emergency funds for numerous Planned Parenthood clinics, this relief came too late, forcing them to shutter their doors and leave tens of thousands without affordable, accessible, and safe reproductive care.

Luckily, the ban expired. But that doesn’t mean the burden on Planned Parenthood ended, as women from states where their right to choose has been stripped from them are fleeing to California to receive the care they need. They are, of course, welcome with open arms. But more resources haven’t been allocated to meet this growing need.

Nor is MAGA done trying to prevent all Americans from receiving abortion care, as the Life at Conception Act, a proposed national abortion ban, is making its way through both the House and the Senate.

I kept all this in mind as I entered the book sale this past Friday, utility cart in tow. I didn’t even try to rein myself in this time around. My cart overflowed with vintage copies of Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiography and Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery masterpiece Gaudy Night, brand-new titles by Anne Applebaum and Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, a boatload of books for my kids. When I reached the checkout line, the volunteer in charge of tallying up my total smiled. “Here we go!” she said.

“Couldn’t help myself,” I said, smiling cheerfully, content to know that every book I bought laid another brick in the bulwark of a woman’s right to choose, and every word in them a thumbed nose at those who deny us.