Planned Parenthood: Republicans’ New Devil
Republicans are ready to shut down the government over abortion, in taking their fight to defund Planned Parenthood, to the extreme.
Everyone knows by now that abortions make up only 3% of the services provided by Planned Parenthood. The other 97% is dedicated to women’s reproductive health, as well as anemia testing, cholesterol screening, diabetes screening, physical exams, drug screenings (including for employment and sports), flu vaccines, help with quitting smoking, high blood pressure screening, tetanus vaccines, and thyroid screening.
Damn Planned Parenthood for providing necessary, affordable and accessible health care! Those devils!
Senate Republicans held a vote Monday evening to defund Planned Parenthood by stripping $528 million in federal funds for the organization. A procedural hurdle in the Senate caused it to fail, but now Republicans have vowed to roar back, and hard-liners are ready to shut down the government come September, just as they did for two weeks in 2011, when they refused to fund Obamacare.
Abortions have become the rallying cry for Republicans, and the (now debunked) video of a Planned Parenthood employee discussing fetal tissue’s “monetary value,” has given them their latest fuel for their fire. Forget that it was heavily edited, and has proven to be an inaccurate rendering of the actual spoken words.
Republicans don’t care about the truth. They only care about advancing their agenda, even if it means relying on the edited tapes provided by a desperate and deceitful anti-abortion advocacy group known as the Center for Medical Progress.
Senator Joni Ernst (Iowa), is leading the defunding effort, and has fanned the flames considerably by accusing Planned Parenthood of “harvesting baby body parts.”
That’s almost as horrifying as Sarah Palin’s “Death Panels,” at least to those who never bother to become accurately informed. And “harvesting baby body parts” is just as much a lie as “death panels” has proven to be.
I called my Republican Congressmen and expressed my desire that they back off from this latest attack on Planned Parenthood. I stated what everyone who cares to listen and learn knows: Planned Parenthood continues to play a major role in its patients’ overall well-being.
Death Panels? Republicans are the ones chairing those panels by trying to shut down an organization that prevents and treats serious medical conditions that living, breathing, tax-paying adults suffer from.
But that’s okay by them, as long as fetal tissue—which is most often used in studying fetal development, fetal abnormalities and diseases of the fetus—is protected from any supposed malfeasance on the part of Planned Parenthood, since it is partially funded by the government.
And they’ll try to shut down the government to make their ignorance-based, fear-inciting, ill-conceived point.
