Trump to Planned Parenthood: Stop Abortions or Lose Funding
Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
President Donald J. Trump, famous for his negotiations skills, made Planned Parenthood an offer on Monday – they can keep their taxpayer funding if they agree to stop performing abortions.
Townhall is reporting on the informal offer, which was made to Planned Parenthood in a statement to The New York Times (NYT).
“As I said throughout the campaign, I am pro-life and I am deeply committed to investing in women’s health and plan to significantly increase federal funding in support of nonabortion services such as cancer screenings,” Trump told the NYT. “Polling shows the majority of Americans oppose public funding for abortion, even those who identify as pro-choice. There is an opportunity for organizations to continue the important work they do in support of women’s health, while not providing abortion services.”
Of course, Planned Parenthood quickly responded with a rejection of the deal.
“Let’s be clear: Federal funds already do not pay for abortions,” Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said on Monday. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept. Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”
Of course, no one said anything about denying “critical health care services” to women. Only in Planned Parenthood’s world of obfuscation and deception can abortion even remotely fit into the category of critical health care services. To most everyone else, it’s an elective procedure that ends a human life.
But there is still a long way to go before taxpayer funding to the abortion industry is cut. While the newly crafted replacement to Obamacare includes a provision that will gut most of Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding, a 1995 precedent may allow strict Senate rules to remove the funding restrictions on abortion.
As LifeSiteNews is reporting, the old law subsidized abortion but the new bill replaces these subsidies with tax credits. Although the bill contains provisions that prevent these tax credits from being used to fund abortion, pro-life groups are worried the Senate may remove them.
“House Republicans must ensure that the Obamacare ‘replace’ bill’s funding protections for the right to life of unborn babies must not be left up to chance or turned into a political bargaining chip,” Family Research Council’s David Christensen wrote in an email to supporters. “FRC – along with other pro-lifers – is very concerned that strict Senate budget rules could strip out any provisions stopping funding for elective abortion in healthcare ‘replace’ programs such as universal tax credits and other subsidies for healthcare.”
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups are beginning to panic.
“The threat we’ve been warning about has just hit the House of Representatives,” Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards wrote in an email to supporters when the new healthcare bill was announced. This bill is the “most serious threat to patients in Planned Parenthood’s 100-year history.”
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