Poor pitiful Planned Parenthood. A new rule on Title X funding, a program designed to provide health services to low-income people, went into effect Monday, courtesy of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court Appeals – the most liberal appeals court in the nation. Therefore, the nation's behemoth abortion provider will fall on its sword – make that the scalpels and suction machines it uses to end the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies a year – rather than abide by it. As a result, Planned Parenthood will lose $60 million in government funds.
All Planned Parenthood had to do to receive this money was stop referring the women it sees for pregnancy tests to its abortion business in the next room. Planned Parenthood can't do that because, despite what it says about providing health services, abortion is its "core mission." Those were the exact words used by past president Leana Wen this year.
Planned Parenthood tries to obscure its mission by releasing the number of "health services" it provides to women each year while downplaying the number of abortions. If you compare the number of services it lists to the number of abortions, it's only around three percent.
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But wait! If a woman comes in for an abortion, she is given a pregnancy test, one service. Then, she is counseled about having her abortion, another service. She is offered a breast exam – the kind you could do at home (because, contrary to popular opinion, Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms), another service. She is checked for an STD, another service. After the abortion she is given an aspirin, another service. Then she is counseled on contraception, another service. Finally she is given contraceptives, another service, and the government gets billed for them all! Despite Planned Parenthood's designation as a charity, it doesn't do those things for free.
But, $60 million! How many businesses could survive a blow to its bottom line like that and survive? Not many. But before you shed a tear for Planned Parenthood, understand, the $60 million is but a rounding error to an organization whose net assets reached $1.9 billion last year.
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And while the Trump Administration did us a favor by denying the abortion giant $60 million of our hard-earned tax dollars – something his Republican colleagues in Congress have refused to do – it is unfortunately a drop in the proverbial bucket. If you subtract the $60 million from the amount Planned Parenthood received from the government last year, it still received a whopping half billion dollars in government dough! This is dwarfed only by the $631 million it received in private donations from wealthy, zealous pro-abortion advocates.
Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood and its acolytes in the media have presented the new rule in cataclysmic terms. On Monday, this was the lead story on the CBS Evening News. Legal correspondent Jan Crawford pointed out that Planned Parenthood says it serves 40 percent of Title X recipients and that the organization was worried that "some would have to seek care elsewhere." You think?
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So would that be a terrible inconvenience if women couldn't receive legitimate health services from one of some 600 Planned Parenthood facilities? Hardly, since there are more than 4,000 federally-qualified Title X service sites across America, and the new Title X rule does not cut funds for these services at all.
Crawford wrapped up her report on CBS by warning viewers of Planned Parenthood's dire situation. "They said some states are going to pick up this shortfall. They can tap into some of their emergency funds, contingency funds, and also through fund-raising. But Norah (directed to anchor Norah O'Donnell), they stress that is not a long-term solution," she bemoaned. Nevertheless, she reported that the organization will fight on through the courts.
Good luck with that. The new rule is really an old rule put in place by Ronald Reagan, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Rust v. Sullivan. However, by the time this rule wound its way through the courts, Bill Clinton was president and did away with it. The new Trump rule goes even further than the Reagan rule requiring recipients to completely separate its abortion facilities from its other Title X service centers, requiring separate staffs.
Planned Parenthood can't afford to do that because the other "services" only exist to feed its abortion business.
So don't shed a tear for Planned Parenthood. Shed a tear for the over 300,000 babies whose lives are snuffed out in their clinics each year, and for all the women who will come to regret the choices they made there.
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