The Senate will vote later today on whether to continue to give hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood, which performs more than 300,000 abortions annually and is embroiled in a scandal over supplying organs from aborted babies to corporations in the fetal organ harvesting trade. The bill would send the funds Planned Parenthood normally receives to Community Health Centers instead.
Despite a lack of media enthusiasm for covering the topic, four bombshell videos have been released showcasing top Planned Parenthood officials haggling over how much to sell baby parts for, discussing how to modify where the babies are crushed to preserve their organs, explaining how to avoid public scrutiny for their participation in the organ harvesting trade, and picking over organs and limbs of children recently killed in abortion.
Abortion extremists and other supporters of Planned Parenthood have complained that a vote to defund Planned Parenthood would be a vote to hurt women. They say that Planned Parenthood is a vital provider of women’s health care services. But that’s only true, Democrats for Life of America explains, “if you define health care services as abortion.”
Charles Camosy, an associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University and the author of Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation, wrote about the two groups recently:
The first thing to get clear is that Planned Parenthood actually doesn’t provide all that much for poor, vulnerable women — particularly if they don’t live in cities. Indeed, you may remember that, in wake of the Susan J. Komen defunding ridiculousness from a few years ago, lots of charges were thrown around about women losing out on mammograms. But it turns out that Planned Parenthood doesn’t even provide them. As Democrats for Life has pointed out numerous times in recent days, the number of local community health centers outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics ten to one. Rather than the one-size-fits-all franchise approach of Planned Parenthood, these community health centers nicely embody the principle of subsidiarity in responding to the diverse local needs of women — whether in the Bronx, rural Kansas, or southern California.
Democrats for Life isn’t the only group pushing the Senate to switch its funding from the abortion clinics to community health centers that provide a wide range of services for both men and women. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is also pushing the change.
It has long been troubling to many Americans that the nation’s largest abortion network, performing over a third of all abortions, receives over half a billion taxpayer dollars a year. This concern has rightly grown in recent years.
The most recent revelations about Planned Parenthood’s willingness to traffic in fetal tissue from abortions, and to alter abortion methods not for any reason related to women’s health but to obtain more “intact” organs, is the latest demonstration of a callousness toward women and their unborn children that is shocking to many Americans.
The Catholic Church comes to this issue from a perspective rooted in experience. Catholic charitable agencies and pregnancy help centers have helped countless pregnant women find life-affirming alternatives to abortion. Our hospitals and other health facilities are second to none in providing quality health care for women.
We support the legislative proposal to reallocate federal funding, so that women can obtain their health care from providers that do not promote abortion. It is my sincere hope that you will be able to help advance this goal by supporting S. 1881.
The Senate vote is expected to take place around 5:00 p.m.