Planned Parenthood appears to be closer than ever to losing its federal taxpayer funding. Donald Trump, for example, recently signed a bill allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood, which House Speaker Paul Ryan said was an important step in protecting taxpayers. “Taxpayers should not be forced to fund abortion, plain and simple,” Ryan said. It seems clear that the Trump administration, along with the Republican-led Congress, are in prime position to finally ending taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. So naturally, Planned Parenthood and its media allies are frantically trying to convince Americans that Planned Parenthood is about more than just abortion.
The latest example is “Marie Claire,” which posted an exclusive video from the Cancer Survivors Network for Planned Parenthood, urging taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood to continue because women rely on the abortion giant for vital health care — like cancer screenings.
“If Planned Parenthood is defunded,” the magazine claims, “American women (and men) will miss out on more than 650,000 cancer prevention and screening services.” The article also makes the argument that taxpayer dollars don’t go towards abortion, ever:
Because of the Hyde Amendment, no federal taxpayer dollars ever go toward abortions anyway. That means that if the states choose to stop giving Medicaid reimbursements or family planning grants to Planned Parenthood—which, thanks to the new bill, they can—they will be taking money away from preventive health care, birth control, pregnancy tests, and other women’s health services. Things like the 360,000 breast exams and 270,000 Pap tests Planned Parenthood provides to American women every year.
This is all very, very false.
First, it’s worth pointing out that even with the Hyde Amendment, taxpayer dollars still fund abortion. Hyde, for example, does prevent Medicaid dollars from being used on abortions… except in cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother. So right off the bat, certain abortions are being funded by taxpayer dollars. Multiple states also fund abortions, and some audits have also found illegal federal taxpayer funding for abortions. New York, for example — and Planned Parenthood in particular — was found to be illegally billing the federal government for elective abortions. Carole Novielli also previously reported for Live Action News that taxpayers funded $500,659 for abortions under Medicaid assistance programs in 2015, based on expenditure reports published on Medicaid.gov. The data was confirmed by a spokesperson from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Second, Planned Parenthood is not the bastion of health care that its supporters want the public to believe it is. The reality is, Planned Parenthood serves a small percentage of women. The most recent data shows that they perform less than 2 percent of all cancer screenings, less than 1 percent of all pap exams, and less than 2 percent of all breast exams. Planned Parenthood staffers have testified that health care is not a priority, with health care services dropping each year: breast exams by over 60 percent, pap tests by 77 percent, and cancer screening and prevention by over 68 percent.
Besides this, Planned Parenthood also provides exactly zero mammograms — according to its own CEO:
“There was no prenatal care, there was nothing we could offer women who were pregnant,” Ramona Trevino, a former Planned Parenthood manager, said. “There was nothing that we could offer women seeking fertility treatments or who were trying to conceive…. When women would come in who had a legitimate problem… we could not diagnose.”
People don’t want their taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, so it’s only natural that Planned Parenthood and its allies would want people to believe that they are providing vital services that women can’t go without. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true. Planned Parenthood is an abortion corporation, plain and simple. And providing health care for women is not a priority for them, no matter how many times they claim otherwise.
