Planned Parenthood is nations largest abortion provider but will taxpayers agree to subsidize it?
From The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
Democrats have been picking fight after fight in the culture wars believing they have the upper hand with socially liberal younger votes. But that assumption is now being tested in the wake of videos of Planned Parenthood doctors
blithely discussing the harvesting of fetal body parts.
The videos secretly recorded by anti-abortion activists show the doctors discussing among other things the best way to ensure a less crunchy" aborted fetus. Its gruesome stuff especially for anyone who has viewed
the sonogram of an unborn child.
Planned Parenthoods defenders are crying foul over the secret taping but these same folks didnt object when Mitt Romney was taped in 2012 discussing the 47."
Their real worry is that the public might begin to figure out that Planned Parenthood is the nations largest abortion provider and that taxpayers are subsidizing it. More broadly the episode might return the abortion debate back to a middle ground that allows some sensible regulation and limits on abortion.
Planned Parenthoods 2013-14 annual report lists $1.3 billion in revenues
including $528 million in government health services grants and reimbursements." Dawn Laguens executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund says the vast majority" of federal funding for Planned Parenthoods nonprofit health centers is reimbursement for Medicaid visits and the rest goes to things like teen pregnancy prevention and evidence-based sex education."
But money is fungible and every dollar in taxpayer funding allows Planned Parenthood to use its other funds to finance abortion. This financial two-step evades the fundamental political bargain that Congress has struck since the Supreme Court made abortion a constitutional right in 1973. That bargain codified in the Hyde Amendment of 1976 and countless times since is that while abortion is legal
taxpayers should not have to pay for a practice they find morally objectionable.
This compromise has long been bipartisan or at least it was until the left concluded it had won the culture war. President Bill Clinton felt obliged to say abortion should be safe legal and rare." And even ObamaCare didnt pass the House in 2010 until Bart Stupak and other pro-life Democrats staged a kabuki drama in which they elicited a promise that mandated health policies wouldnt finance abortion.
We know thanks to the Administrations arguments in the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case
that this was all a ruse.
Now come the ugly videos which are reminding Americans that the left brooks no restrictions at all on abortion rights even up to the moment of birth. This includes harvesting fetal organs and financing their delivery for medical research.
Planned Parenthood says it doesnt sell those body parts which would be illegal but it doesnt deny that it accepts payment for getting those parts to researchers.
This is deeply offensive to millions of Americans and its no shock that Republicans are moving to vote on whether taxpayers should underwrite such an operation.
The surprise would be if they didnt.
On Wednesday
Senate Republicans led by Joni Ernst (Iowa)
Rand Paul (Kentucky) and
James Lankford (Oklahoma) introduced a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood while providing the same dollars to alternative womens health-service providers.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is promising a vote before Senators leave next week for August recess.
The bill states that nothing in its language shall be construed to reduce overall Federal funding available in womens health." Instead of going to Planned Parenthood the money would go to health centers hospitals and other organizations that provide non-abortion services for womens health.
The leaders on the cultural left are shouting as usual about limiting health care for women and denying their right to choose. But no such right is in jeopardy. Planned Parenthood can finance all the abortions it wants but it would have to raise other funds to do it. Surely there are enough rich progressive donors in Greenwich and Silicon Valley.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest says President Obama opposes any funding cuts to Planned Parenthood and no doubt he will veto the bill if it reaches his desk. But at least he and Members of Congress would be obliged to go on the record.
In its political ascendancy the cultural left has become even more intolerant of dissenting views. On gay marriage opponents must be silenced and are obliged to provide services regardless of their religious objections. And the right to have an abortion isnt enough; opponents must be forced to pay for it.
By all means
lets have a vote about taxpayer funding for fetal organ harvesting.
