The effort to defund Planned Parenthood has failed on the national level, but pro-lifers in the states have taken up the battle to cut off taxpayer funds to the organization, which has cornered a third of the abortion business in the United States.
Kansas and Indiana are just two states attempting to ensure that taxpayer funds are not used to murder the unborn. Leading the charge in Kansas is pro-life Gov. Sam Brownback, whose predecessor Kathleen Sebelius is a longtime dissident Catholic abortion enthusiast.
Brownback, who represented the state in the senate from 1996 to 2011, has a long record of pro-life activism that he brings to the governor's chair. “Gov. Brownback, along with the overwhelming majority of Kansans, opposes taxpayer subsidy of abortions,” Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag told the Kansas City Star.
Kansas
The Brownback effort would not stop money from going to family planning. Rather, the Star reported, it would redirect federal funds, some $300,000, to clinics that do not perform abortions.
According to the Star, money for Planned Parenthood lands in Hays and Wichita, Kan., where "[t]he money pays for family planning services for low-income women. The money also helps pay for contraception, Pap smears and cancer screenings, among other things."
The Planned Parenthood money is among $2.9 million that the state receives in so-called federal Title 10 funds, which go toward family planning activities. …
The Hays and Wichita clinics serve nearly 9,000 people, of which about 80 percent qualify for subsidized family planning services.
Unsurprisingly, the pro-abortion crowd in Kansas is aghast, the Star reported.
“If that money is taken away from Planned Parenthood, fewer low-income people would get family planning services in Kansas, more will get pregnant and more will have abortions,” [a PP spokesman] predicted.
Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican and an abortion rights supporter, said Planned Parenthood will probably lose the money when the Legislature returns to approve a budget this week.
Bollier added that many lawmakers believe their constituents want them to oppose anything connected to abortion, including funding of contraceptives and Planned Parenthood.
“I am absolutely amazed that people who want to reduce abortions believe they can do so by cutting off funding for contraceptives,” she said.
Planned Parenthood claims a "majority" of people want to fund it. That statement does not comport with recent polling, but in any event Brownback's opponents also claim the two targeted clinics do not perform abortions.
Regardless of what those clinics do, Brownback wants to shut off the taxpayer spigot to Planned Parenthood, LifeSiteNews.com reports. Says Brownback: “Kansas, in the heart of America, is a culture of life state — and we’re not going back.”
Writing at the Family Research Council’s website, FRC President Tony Perkins explained that Kansas was setting an example for other states:
With a pro-life leader at the helm, Kansas is boldly going where no state has gone before. Under a new budget proposal, local legislators are trying redirect the $300,000 in federal funds for Planned Parenthood and farm it out to local health clinics that haven’t been implicated in criminal cover-ups,” he said. “If Congress won’t pull the multi-million dollar rug out from under the abortion giant, Governors like Sam Brownback will. If Brownback’s budget is as popular with legislators as it is with voters, July 1 would be the date that Kansas declares its independence from Planned Parenthood.
Indiana
Kansas isn’t the only state where pro-lifers are trying to create a culture of life. In the Hoosier State, leftists and abortion advocates suffered a crushing defeat when the state Senate recently voted to end funding for Planned Parenthood by a 35-13 vote.
As LifeSiteNews.com observed, the vote came just days after the U.S. Senate voted down a measure to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. That legislation originated with abortion foe Rep. Mike Pence in the U.S. House. The debate over it became a major point in recent budget negotiations to avoid a shutdown of the federal government.
Abortion advocates in Indiana, the Indianapolis Star reports, warn that the senate's move could jeopardize $4 million in federal "family planing" funds. They argue that violating a federal law that prohibits the states from choosing who provides services to Medicaid patients imperils that funding.
The Star makes clear that abortion supporters will use the funding threat to scare Gov. Mitch Daniels (photo, above), who doesn’t much care for social issues, into vetoing the funding cut for Planned Parenthood. That would put Daniels, who says Republicans and conservatives must declare a "truce" on social issues, squarely in the position helping an organization that is responsible for more violence against children in the womb than any other.
The bill, which also bans abortions after 20 weeks because an unborn child feels pain when it is killed, awaits action in the Indiana House.
Planned Parenthood And Abortion
Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar abortion factory that erased more than 300,000 unborn lives in 2008. It performed a record 332,278 abortions in 2009, a 2.5 percent increase over its 324,008 abortions in 2008. PP performs nearly 30 percent of all abortions in the United States. LifeSiteNews.com reported the figures, using PP's data.
The organzation receives some $350 million in taxpayer subsidies annually. It received about $2 billion between 2002 and 2008. The Government Accountability Office questions the organization’s handling of taxpayer subsidies.
Planned Parenthood was the brainchild of the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who conceived something called "The Negro Project" to limit the size of black families.
