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Defunding Planned Parenthood
By Randall K O’Bannon, Ph.D., and Derrick Jones
With annual revenues approaching a billion dollars and a bottom line that would make most for-profit businesses envious, one would hardly think America’s largest abortion chain would have need of a government handout. Yet federal and state governments have poured hundreds of millions of dollars a year into Planned Parenthood over the past several decades, helping fuel its ever-expanding abortion empire. Some in Congress have had enough and have decided it’s time to shut off the flow of federal family planning funds to groups that perform and promote abortion here in the U.S., just as the government has done to those groups promoting or performing abortion worldwide.
An amendment to an appropriations bill sponsored by pro-life Congressman Mike Pence (R-In.) to deny family planning funds to Planned Parenthood garnered 189 votes on July 19, 2007, surprising many of the organization’s defenders. A switch of 22 votes would have led to the amendment’s passage.
New bills up for consideration in Congress would prohibit funding to groups like Planned Parenthood that perform abortions. National Right to Life is urging lawmakers to pass S. 351, the “Title X Family Planning Act,” sponsored by Senator David Vitter (R-La.), or H.R. 4133, the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act,” sponsored by Rep. Pence, which would put these limits on federal family planning funds.
“Taxpayer funds should not be given to organizations that are the backbone of the abortion industry, such as Planned Parenthood,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of National Right to Life, adding, “These bills do not call for a reduction in family planning funding, rather they prevent abortion providers from receiving tax dollars.” S. 351 and H.R. 4133 would deny federal family planning funds to non-hospitals that perform abortions, with narrow exceptions.
According to its 2005–06 annual report, Planned Parenthood received $305.3 million in “Government Grants and Contracts.” The report also shows that Planned Parenthood performed 264,943 abortions in 2005—nearly 20% of all abortions in the United States. While Planned Parenthood maintains that federal funds do not pay for abortions, this massive infusion of taxpayer cash has helped build the organization into the nation’s largest chain of abortion clinics. In addition, Planned Parenthood is heavily involved in pro-abortion lobbying.
According to a recently published detailed, hard-hitting exposé by journalist Charlotte Allen, “Planned Parenthood’s Unseemly Empire” (The Weekly Standard, October 22, 2007, online at www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/223livny.asp), about $120 million of Planned Parenthood’s funds comes from the federal government. Slightly under half of that came from Title X, a federal “family planning” program that is supposed to provide free contraceptives to reproductive-age women from “low income families.”
Another big source of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, to the tune of $61 million, is “Medicaid Waivers,” a program begun in 1993 under the Clinton Administration. In this program, the Department of Health and Human Services can issue states a “waiver” of normal income limits, so that women up to 200% of the federal poverty level can obtain free contraceptives.
There are rules in place that are supposed to prohibit federal family planning funds from going directly to support abortion, but this ignores how those funds serve the purpose of promoting the Planned Parenthood brand among abortion-vulnerable women and help keep abortion clinics open across the United States.
https://www.nrlc.org/archive/news/2007/NRL12/PP.html