Days after Republican Congressmen in Washington abandoned the effort to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funds, the battle continues in state legislatures across the country.
In North Carolina, Republicans added a provision to the state budget last week that would prohibit the state from providing grants or entering into contracts with Planned Parenthood, a measure which would deprive the organization of the $473,000 it currently receives through state family planning programs.
Representative Nelson Dollar, chairman of the House appropriation subcommittee for Health and Human Services, told the Raleigh News and Observer newspaper that the provision is unrelated to the issue of abortion.
“There are a whole host of programs being reduced. Planned Parenthood is not unique,” he said, adding that the proposed budget still allocated $3.6 million towards other teen pregnancy prevention programs.
A similar measure prohibiting state grants and contracts with Planned Parenthood was added to a pro-life bill in Indiana yesterday. According to an Associated Press report, Planned Parenthood is currently receiving $3 million in Indiana state funds.
The larger bill of which the funding provision is now a part, HB 1210, would also prohibit abortions after 20 weeks gestation. The current legal cut-off in Indiana is 24 weeks. The bill has yet to be voted on by the state Senate.
Also on Monday, Minnesota Republicans introduced SF 1224, a bill that does not mention Planned Parenthood by name, but which prohibits state grant funds from being given to any organization that provides abortions or refers patients for abortion.
If passed, the bill would remove state funds from all of the 24 clinics that Planned Parenthood operates in Minnesota.
This past week’s legislation mirrors other recent efforts in Wisconsin and New Hampshire to keep Planned Parenthood from receiving fund from state coffers. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker unveiled a budget proposal in early March which eliminates the Title V Maternal and Child Health Program. Title V is the source of roughly $1 million in funding for Planned Parenthood’s 27 Wisconsin clinics, according to the Huffington Post.
The proposed budget is currently stalled by tense debate over its radical overhaul of state finances, including cuts in education, and health-care and pension plans for public employees.
Legislative efforts in New Hampshire have also come to a standstill, after a bill specifically targeting Planned Parenthood was introduced in early February. HB 228 would, like the North Carolina and Indiana legislation, prohibit the state from entering into a contract with Planned Parenthood; it is currently retained in committee in the House.
Planned Parenthood stands to lose approximately $800,000 if the New Hampshire legislation is passed.
Abortion is about profits. It’s a business. If we vote to cut off the taxpayer subsidies, the abortions will stop. Get government out of the health care business, and the abortions will stop.
In a historic vote Friday afternoon, the US House voted to strike all federal funding for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Every year the abortion giant receives hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
The congressional body voted 240-185 in favor of the amendment, introduced by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), to the 2011 Federal Spending Bill.
Immediately after the vote Rep. Pence released a statement saying: “This afternoon’s vote is a victory for taxpayers and a victory for life. By banning federal funding to Planned Parenthood, Congress has taken a stand for millions of Americans who believe their tax dollars should not be used to subsidize the largest abortion provider in America.
“I commend my colleagues in both parties for taking a stand for taxpayers and a stand for life.”
The amendment will now go before the Senate.
The vote came after a heated debate in the House. It also comes in the wake of an explosive series of videos released over the last two weeks by the pro-life organization Live Action, which showed Planned Parenthood staff repeatedly willing to aid and abet the trafficking of underage “sex workers” by offering advice to an undercover investigator posing as a “pimp” on how to obtain secret abortions, contraception, and STD tests.
I’m sure the House Clerk has had his hands full all week, with the nearly 600 amendments filed and the many that were voted on during the fiscal 2011 spending debate. As a result, his website has been rather slow to update. At this point, though, we have all the votes on the spending bill, and there are two I’d like to point out right away. I’ll look at the final vote in a subsequent post, but here is the first one, yesterday’s Pence Amendment, by which the House voted rather convincingly to stop $363 million in subsidies for the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and its many affiliates nationwide.
Even if you’re not a social conservative, funding for Planned Parenthood as a fiscal and a campaign finance issue. Currently, taxpayers are effectively subsidizing the Democratic Party. Planned Parenthood is a charity with plenty of donors. There’s no reason why taxpayers should have to support their favorite charity so that they can give more of their money to Democrats.
Take, for example, Planned Parenthood of Greater Indiana. Its IRS 990 form for 2009 reports that this affiliate had $10.6 million in revenue from patient services (including $1.2 million from Medicaid — an entitlement not covered by this spending bill). It raised $2 million and then took in $3 million in government grants. On the other side of the ledger, the group reports providing $14.6 million in services. With additional efforts to raise money and a bit of budgeting, they could probably operate at the same pace without the special handouts. (Their medical director made about $300,000 in 2009 — if he believes very strongly in the cause, perhaps he can settle for a bit less.)
If abortion were really supported by the majority of the American people, then surely the people who support abortion would be able to dig deep into their own wallets and just give Planned Parenthood all the money it needs to keep killing helpless babies. But I don’t think they are going to do that. And since they are not going to do that, Planned Parenthood will probably have to raise their prices for abortions. And as long as Obamacare doesn’t fund those abortions, then a lot more people are going to have to pay more for abortions. And since a lot more people don’t want to spend that money on abortions, a lot more people are going to stop treating sex as a recreational activity and behave more responsibly. Responsible behavior is what happens when people have to face the consequences of their own decisions.
I’m a fiscal conservative and a social conservative, and I don’t want my tax money going to kill innocent babies. I worked for that money and it’s mine – I earned it. I have to work weekends without pay just to keep my job. If all of these left-wing liberals are so comfortable with their jobs and salaries that they have extra money to spend on baby-killing, then let them give their money to Planned Parenthood. My money is for providing for my (future) babies, and paying for their graduate degrees. If I have to pay for other people’s plans to kill babies, then I can’t pay for my plan to raise them.
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.”
– Adrian Rogers, former President of the Southern Baptist Convention
And a quote from Michael Medved:
The only real alternative to government as a source of assistance, authority and a functioning civil society remains the “little platoons” described by Edmund Burke — families and communities shaped by attitudes that count as both economically and culturally conservative.
Abortion will be severely restricted abortion providers realize that there is no money to be made by killing innocent people. That’s why we need to stop paying them our money.
While the Kermit Gosnell story is still being ignored by the mainstream media, I though I would investigate the groups who promote abortion.
The support for abortion comes entirely from the secular left, especially from the Darwinists, the feminists and the global warming alarmists. Let’s take a look at each of them.
“I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies. You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.”
Unsurprisingly, Myers is “pro-choice”. But Myers’ advocacy of “choice” goes further:
“…I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion…”
“Pro-abortion”? Even committed pro-abortion zealots don’t generally endorse abortion explicitly, except to assert the right to ‘choice,’ as if one were choosing a salad dressing rather than deciding to take a human life.
Myers:
“[I] would like to encourage more people to abort…”
Meyers is considered to be one of the more rabid atheistic evangelists operating today. But there are tons of virulent atheists operating on the taxpayer’s dime in the university.
The denial of basic human rights by the pro-abortion population control thugs is expanding. My colleague Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke quotes Peter Singer, a utilitarian atheist-Darwinist ethicist at Princeton, who has denied that young children meet the standards for personhood and has stated that many intelligent animals ought to have more rights than young children.
Singer:
“When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would . . . be right to kill him.”
“Maybe the law has to have clear bright lines and has to take birth as the right time, although maybe it should make some exceptions in the cases of severe disability where parents think that it is better for the child and better for the family that the child does not live…The position that allows abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances…If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life.”[emphasis mine]
This is where the ideas of Kermit Gosnell are taught to students – in the left-wing universities. Singer and Meyers are committed atheists, committed Darwinists and radically pro-abortion. Atheism has killed over 100 million people in the last 100 years. Atheism is the repudiation of objective morality. When you repudiate objective morality, you get mass murder. Sometimes through abortion, sometimes through DDT bans, sometimes through revolutions and wars, and sometimes in the Gulag. These are things that are natural on atheism – survival of the fittest. Kill the weak. That’s their view. And when people like Grosnell go off to college, that’s what they learn.
Feminists in government
First, it’s important to understand that third-wave feminism, (hereafter “feminism”) is one of the movements that brought about abortion.
Excerpt:
A growing movement in America, spearheaded by Sarah Palin, is pro-life feminism, This attempts to decouple feminism from abortion rights, arguing that you can believe in a woman’s right to be empowered without believing in her right to abort. Its proponents report a groundswell of support among young women looking to reinvent their mothers’ ideology.
But you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control. The single biggest factor in women’s liberation was our newly found ability to impose our will on our biology.
[…]As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.
Actually, first-wave feminism, which I agree with, WAS pro-life. But today, what people mean by feminism is third-wave feminism, and third-wave feminism requires abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy.
Which political party supports that third-wave feminist view?
“Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I am committed to protecting this constitutional right. I also remain committed to policies, initiatives, and programs that help prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption,” the president said in a statement. “And on this anniversary, I hope that we will recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”
“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. . . .”
That’s feminism – the official view of the Democrat party.
Philadelphia, where Kermit Grosnell practiced, is DOMINATED by Democrats at all levels of government. It’s very similar to Chicago in that respect. And the state had a Democrat governor for the longest time as well.
Ask yourself why you are not hearing about which root causes and whose rhetoric are to blame for this four-decades-long massacre — just the tip of a blood-soaked iceberg defended by the predators of Planned Parenthood. You know the answer: If it doesn’t help the Left criminalize conservatism, it’s not worth discussing.
From the conclusion of the grand jury report: “It is not our job to say who should be fired or demoted. We believe, however, that anyone responsible for permitting Gosnell to operate as he did should face strong disciplinary action up to and including termination. This includes not only the people who failed to do the inspecting, the prosecuting, and the protecting, but also those at the top who obviously tolerated, or even encouraged, the inaction. The Department of State literally licensed Gosnell’s criminally dangerous behavior. DOH gave its stamp of approval to his facility. These agencies do not deserve the public’s trust. The fate of Karnamaya Mongar and countless babies with severed spinal cords is proof that people at those departments were not doing their jobs. Those charged with protecting the public must do better.”
And she has also written about how Obama’s science czar is a proponent of eugenics and coerced abortion. This man was appointed by Barack Obama. This is the Democrat view – they LOVE abortion. And some of them even love infanticide.
Obama himself voted twice against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.
Obama also likes to give speeches to Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States.
[Planned Parenthood] took home $85 million in “excess of revenue over expenses” (a nifty way of saying profits) and had an operating budget of over $1 billion for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, according to its latest annual report. Included in that budget was $350 million in “government grants and contracts” (an equally nifty way of saying your tax dollars). An increase in the number of abortions performed helped fuel the profits.
Abortion is a very profitable business, and the pro-abortion politicians subsidize the abortion industry with taxpayer dollars, including dollars from pro-life taxpayers, in exchange for political contributions to their campaigns. Yes, the contributions go almost entirely to Democrats.
Global warming alarmists
Here’s an article that explains what global warmists think about people having babies.
Excerpt:
Couples who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the British government’s green adviser warned.
Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming.
He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.
A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.
“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
Democrats what to use government to promote abortion in order to stop global warming.
WINTERY KNIGHT 