House Republicans have made a commitment to life. The time is now to make that commitment a reality -- House Speaker Paul Ryan
Congress needs to redirect money away from America’s killing machine – Planned Parenthood – and it needs to do it now.
While many are disappointed that a provision to defund the nation's largest abortion seller was not included in the bill to keep the government running through September, there are still ways for Congress to make good on President Trump's and Speaker Ryan's pledges to stop sending tax dollars to abortionists.
However the House and Senate use the budget reconciliation process to defund Planned Parenthood, they must do so immediately. Taxpayers can no longer be coerced into subsidizing 320,000 babies' deaths a year.
The time to defund Planned Parenthood is now. Not during the next fiscal year’s appropriations process. Now.
The Planned Parenthood propaganda factory, of course, has been preparing for this battle since at least November 8th. With over $400 million in annual funding at stake, it will say and do whatever it thinks it can get away with to keep its death grip on taxpayers’ wallets.
For instance, we will undoubtedly hear that dismembering people in the womb is only a tiny fraction – three percent – of the services Planned Parenthood renders.
Putting aside the fact that even liberal publications have declared the three-percent figure to be “misleading” and “meaningless,” it’s possible that Planned Parenthood might still be correct. If each instance of fraud, racism, deception, ignoring possible sex trafficking, and selling aborted babies’ body parts by Planned Parenthood is counted as a separate “service,” then indeed, abortion might only account for three percent of what the abortion business does.
Let’s start with fraud allegations.
Over 50 audits of Planned Parenthood have found at least $12.8 million in waste, abuse, and potentially fraudulent overbilling committed by the abortion business -- money taken out of the government treasury, that is, our pockets. Former Planned Parenthood employees say that the amount is actually larger. Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast paid $4.3 million to settle a Texas Medicaid fraud case. According to the Alliance Defending Freedom, “nearly one in four Planned Parenthood businesses has been implicated in financial fraud or mismanagement.”
Is that the kind of organization that should be entrusted with more public funds?
How about racism?
When a man acting undercover for the group Live Action called seven Planned Parenthood offices across the country asking if he could donate money specifically for the abortion of black babies, all seven offices said they would accept his donations for that purpose. It didn’t matter that the man said that he wanted to “lower the number of blacks in America.” In fact, one woman who identified herself as the vice president of marketing for Planned Parenthood in Idaho said she was “excited” about the man’s request to target African Americans.
Are there any other racist organizations that receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the government?
Deception? How about the absolute lie put forth by Planned Parenthood that it provided mammogram exams – when it turned out that not one of the group’s clinics has a mammogram machine? Or better yet, just ask the women of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign who have suffered abortions at the hands of Planned Parenthood.
At the Silent No More webpage on Planned Parenthood, woman after woman recounts how she was deceived by the abortion business. Some were given no counseling at all. Rather than receiving the advertised “caring” experience, one says she was “made to feel like a cow going through a cattle run to the slaughter”; another to being “a naïve person who walks into a car dealership just 'looking' and walks out with a very bad deal on a bad car due to high-pressure sales tactics from a slick salesman, followed by buyer’s regret the next day.” One woman notes how, as a minor, she received an abortion from Planned Parenthood without anyone notifying her parents. Another was told as a minor not to mention that her baby’s father was 23 or 24 because “he would get into trouble.”
As the Pastoral Director of both Silent No More and Rachel’s Vineyard, the world’s largest ministry for healing after abortion, I have heard from countless women who have been deceived by Planned Parenthood. Only God knows how many women there are who haven’t come forward.
Should our government subsidize those who turn a blind eye to the sexual abuse and trafficking of minors?
The Alabama health department reported that a Planned Parenthood clinic failed to report the repeated rape of a 14-year-old girl who received two abortions at the clinic over a four-month period. In at least six other states, Planned Parenthood allegedly did not report the sexual abuse of a minor to authorities, in spite of legal requirements to do so, and let statutory rapists go undetected, free to continue their abuse of the minors involved.
And then there’s Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby body parts.
Suffice it to say that the Select Investigative Panel of the House of Representatives has issued a 471-page report resulting in 15 criminal and regulatory referrals for investigation into the practices of Planned Parenthood and other businesses participating in the shady trade of aborted babies’ organs. Coupled with the numerous undercover videos revealing Planned Parenthood’s callous involvement in this practice, there is ample evidence that the nation’s largest abortion company is unworthy of our tax money.
Each of the above summarized offenses are, individually, sufficient reason for Congress to redirect money away from Planned Parenthood and toward federally qualified Community Health Centers that don’t engage in any of these practices. But as important as each of Planned Parenthood’s offenses are, there’s one statement that really begins and ends the debate over public funding of Planned Parenthood.
Americans should not be forced to help a billion-dollar corporation kill unborn children. Not anymore. Not ever again. As Speaker Ryan said, Congress needs to keep its commitment to life – and it needs to keep it now.
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