The notorious abortion group Planned Parenthood, recently exposed for having spent millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars lobbying and electing democrats, again escaped being cut off from the federal dole as the Senate voted 58 to 42 on April 14 to block a House bill defunding the organization.
Five Republican senators joined 53 Democrats to continue unconstitutionally forcing American taxpayers to finance Planned Parenthood, which, in addition to lobbying and buying politicians, now commits more than a quarter of all abortions in America. The House of Representatives voted 241 to 185 to cut off the $350 million per year in federal funding the organization receives.
“Today’s vote was historic because for the first time the Senate was forced to go on record over whether they support using Americans’ tax dollars to support the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood — a bloated, scandal-ridden abortion advocate,” said Americans United for Life President Charmaine Yoest in a statement.
The Republican Senators who voted to continue funding abortion were: Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine, and Mark Kirk of Illinois.
“[T]oday’s vote made clear which senators care more about the interests of the politically influential abortion lobby than the lives and safety of American women and families,” Yoest said after the measure failed.
But for pro-lifers, it gets worse — the abortion organization does far more than just slaughter the unborn. A recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics found that Planned Parenthood and one of its California affiliates together spent more than $700,000 in 2010 just on federal lobbying efforts — more than all other pro-abortion groups combined. In 2008, just Planned Parenthood spent one million dollars on federal lobbying efforts.
During the most recent federal election cycle, its political action committee donated almost half of a million dollars directly to candidates, too. Almost all of the recipients of that money — which, because money is fungible, was essentially taxpayer money — were Democrats.
Also in 2010, the abortion provider spent nearly a million dollars in “independent expenditures” to support or oppose federal candidates. Most of that tax money went to ad campaigns backing pro-abortion candidates and targeting pro-life ones for defeat.
One of the top recipients of Planned Parenthood largesse in the Senate was leftist Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Unsurprisingly, she is also one of Congress’ strongest advocates of lavishing ever-greater sums of taxpayer money on the abortion provider. “Today we stopped a frontal assault on women’s health,” she claimed after the vote. On April 7 she was speaking at a pro-Planned Parenthood rally.
Of course, pro-life organizations that do not slaughter the unborn do not receive tax money. Therefore, they spend far less on lobbying than Planned Parenthood, according to the Center for Responsive Politics report.
The abortion provider and political heavyweight does, however, offer other “services” funded by taxpayers as well. Those include explicit “sex education” for young people and the provision of subsidized birth control, often to youngsters. But despite the claims of Planned Parenthood’s president, a recent undercover investigation indicated that it does not actually offer mammograms.
It turns out that Planned Parenthood is actually very good at the use of deception. For example, the organization claims that abortion is only three percent of its business. It promotes that falsehood by dividing the number of abortions by the number of “services” it provides, rather than the more appropriate and honest methodology that would examine the percentage of the organization’s income derived from abortion. That happens to be more than 40 percent, according to the organization’s own documents cited by the American Life League’s Stop Planned Parenthood campaign.
Planned Parenthood also claims it does not use federal tax dollars for abortion. The falsehood is dismissed by critics because, obviously, money is fungible. A federal dollar spent on giving a condom to a middle-school student saves the organization a dollar to help pay for an abortion.
Of course, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives could have easily blocked funding for Planned Parenthood, since all spending bills must originate in the House. But since President Obama threatened to veto any spending bill that did not fund the lobbying and abortion group, Speaker John Boehner “compromised.”
Apparently Obama and Democratic senators were willing to shut down the federal government over tax funding for the Democrat-party-supporting abortion organization. The GOP, on the other hand, was not — despite the fact that most Americans consider themselves pro-life and the fact that funding abortion and special interests with tax money is not constitutional.
The Senate also rejected another bill on April 14 that had been approved in the House. It would have pulled funding for ObamaCare. The health “reform” legislation has been ruled unconstitutional by two federal judges so far. But Republicans were not willing to let the government shut down over that issue either. Democrats were. And now, Tea Party activists are outraged.
Related article:
Budget Deal Preserves Federal Funding of Planned Parenthood
Photo: Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt with congressman Albert Wynn (D-Md.) in front of the U.S. Supreme Court .
