New Report: Planned Parenthood Raked in $1.5 Billion in Taxpayer Funds Over 3 Years
Planned Parenthood (Screenshot)
A recent government report has revealed that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, received over $1.5 billion in taxpayer funds from 2013 to 2015.
In 2016, over 120 House and Senate members sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting information on federal funding for certain organizations involved in health-related activities.
The report was made public last week, and the findings are astounding.
Over a three-year period, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates spent $288 million in federal funds. They also received $1.2 billion in funding from Medicaid, which combines federal and state funds.
That adds up to a whopping total of $1.5 billion in taxpayer funds from federal health programs.
Yet, despite receiving billions in taxpayer funds over the course of three years, Planned Parenthood’s scope and services have both declined.
The organization’s 2015-2016 report revealed that Planned Parenthood served 100,000 fewer women in 2015-2016 compared to 2014-2015. Its number of health centers and affiliates declined, and it performed fewer cancer screenings and prevention services.
It also performed fewer breast examinations, fewer HPV vaccinations, and provided prenatal services to 8,000 fewer women than the previous year.
But the abortion giant did perform several thousand more abortions than the year prior: 328,348 compared to the previous year’s 323,999. Moreover, Planned Parenthood performed 83 abortions for every one adoption referral.
Planned Parenthood claims to provide a full range of women’s health services and to present women with a variety of choices, but the figures make clear its real priorities. Abortion remains Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.
The Government Accountability Office report also revealed huge sums of taxpayer money went to other abortion providers from 2013 to 2015. Marie Stopes International and International Planned Parenthood Federation received $110 million and $14 million, respectively, for global health assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Fortunately, in 2017, President Donald Trump reinstated the Mexico City policy, aka the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy, so that now these organizations can only receive these global health assistance funds on the condition that they do not perform or promote abortion overseas.
That’s good news, but there is still much more to be done to prevent public funds from being tied up with abortion on demand.
Congress should make it a priority to defund Planned Parenthood and instead direct those funds toward the thousands of centers that provide health care for women without entangling government with the abortion industry.
Congress should then turn its attention to the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which would permanently end taxpayer funding for abortion. That bill passed the House of Representatives in January 2017, but the Senate has failed to take it up.
These shocking new numbers underscore the urgent need for policymakers to move on this issue. We must end taxpayer funding for abortion once and for all.
Monica Burke is a research assistant in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.
Editor's Note: This piece was originally published by The Daily Signal.
March 12,
2018
Scalpels Kill More Kids
than Guns
If you shoot children in a school,
liberals are justifiably outraged, as are we all, even if our solutions to the
problem are different. But when children are murdered in their mother’s womb?
Liberals like to talk about the need for safe spaces, sanctuary cities, and the
need to keep our kids safe from gun violence. Yet they support the ultimate
form of violence in what should be the safest space of all, again, their
mother’s womb.
As one who believes that life begins at
conception and ends at natural death, I object to this double standard
which says the NRA fosters violence against America’s children, but Planned
Parenthood does not. As one wag put it, one of these groups sells arms while
the NRA supports the Second Amendment.
One Democratic presidential wannabe who
argues for total gun control while ignoring this double standard is Sen. Kamala Harris, the poster child for self-righteous indignation:
Senator Kamala Harris, a liberal Democrat
from California, tweeted after the Parkland massacre: “We cannot tolerate a
society and live in a country with pride when our babies are being
slaughtered.” Conservatives pointed out that she votes in lockstep with NARAL
on abortion.
She is perfectly happily to live in a
society where it is wrong to kill a Parkland, Florida student with a gun but
perfectly okay for that student to have an abortion. Ironically, one of the
three women killed at a veteran's home in California was pregnant. Some would say four were killed. Kamala Harris would stop
counting at three.
Harris warmly embraces the Black Lives
Matter movement but only if theses lives, often criminal lives, are ended by
white cops. She cares not if they are extinguished by abortionists like the
infamous Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell was a Philadelphia doctor who was charged with
seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder for
killing seven babies who survived his abortions and a woman who died after a
botched painkiller injection. Comparewhat went on at Gosnell’s clinic to school
shootings like the
ones at Newtown, Connecticut, or Parkland, Florida:
Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice,
there ought to be agreement that a squirming infant on a table outside the
mother's womb is as worthy of protection from harm as children in classrooms in
a school in Connecticut.
If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery
and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject
of presidential hand-wringing.
As J. Kenneth Blackwell, writing in the
Washington Times, noted, those who chant “black lives matter” obviously exclude the
abortion rate of black babies that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger
and the KKK could only dream of:
138,539 black babies, nearly one baby in
three, were killed in the womb in 2010. According to the CDC, between 2007 and
2010, innocent black babies were victimized in nearly 36 percent of the
abortion deaths in the United States, though blacks represent only 12.8 percent
of the population. Some
say the abortion capital of America is New York City. According to
LifeSiteNews, the city’s Department of Health reported that in 2012, more black
babies were aborted (31,328) than born (24,758). That’s 55.9 percent of black
babies killed before birth. Blacks represented 42.4 percent of all abortions.
In short, the life of a young black male
is more likely to be ended in his mother’s womb with a
scalpel than by a
white cop or a gang banger in a drive-by shooting:
Abortion doctors kill more black people in
a week than the KKK has in the past century. There are almost 2,000 black lives
ended by abortion every single day in the United States, and overall, a black
baby is more than 5 times as likely to be executed as a white
baby. Try to reflect on
this statistic: abortion kills more black people than heart disease, cancer,
strokes, accidents, diabetes, homicide, and respiratory illness -- COMBINED. Throw cops in there, too, and it’s still not close. Comparing
just the two causes of death, it appears that abortionists kill about 700 times
more black people than do cops.
It’s a grim picture, to say the least.
Consider that, if not for abortion, the black population would be 36 percent
larger than it is currently. Without Planned Parenthood and its partners in the
Infanticide Industry, black people would be much less a minority in America.
It’s abortion that keeps their percentages so low. It’s abortion that
victimizes them more than anything.
It victimizes people of all races and
should be called what it is -- abortion violence.
Liberal hypocrisy and double standard on
how our children are killed was never more apparent than at this year’s Oscars, where flat tummies are honored, stretch marks are
considered career-enders:
This year’s Academy Awards took place this
past Sunday with a show full of political symbolism and the pushing of the
progressive agenda.
One performance was even an attack on the
National Rifle Association by a pair of rappers. Of course, the NRA has come
under increasing attack from the Hollywood crowd because of the NRA’s support
of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. You know, the right
to bear arms.
The wailing cry of those who think that
the Second Amendment needs to be abridged is that gun violence causes too many
deaths. The national statistics show that there are approximately 15,000 deaths
a year from gun related violence. Unfortunately, that number has slowly risen
in recent years. In an effort to put some significance to that number, the CDC
reports that there are 2,712,630 deaths annually in the United States. Gun
related deathsfrom all sources (violent acts, accidental discharge, suicides, etc.)
total 38,000 and account for about 1.5 percent of all deaths….
That performance, however, was nullified
and made ridiculous by the presence of one individual on the stage for the
attack on the NRA. That person was Cecile Richards, president of Planned
Parenthood Federation of America. The fact that the American Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences would allow the leader of the organization that commits the
most egregious acts of mass murder in United States history to participate in a
performance that is supposedly prompted by the killing of 17 innocent human
beings in Florida is unbelievable. Planned Parenthood kills that many innocent
human beings every 30 minutes of every day of every year… there are about
3,632,630 deaths from all causes in the United States. Abortion can then be
seen as accounting for 25 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
Richards’ organization runs the largest abortion chain and admits to committing
321,384 abortions a year.
That is the population of a mid-size
American city. Bump stocks? How about the scalpel of an abortionist? Which is
more dangerous to our children -- the NRA or Planned Parenthood? The
NRA’s political influence is decried, but not Planned Parenthood’s, which
will play a role in the special election Tuesday in Pennsylvania’s 18th
Congressional District:
In Western Pennsylvania, pro-life Democrat
Conor Lamb is facing a Republican in a special election March 13. The race is
neck-and-neck, despite the fact that Donald Trump carried the district by 20
points. Lamb’s candidacy in this conservative district is helped by the fact
that he’s Catholic -- a self-styled moderate who’s not a slave to Democratic
Party orthodoxy. In fact, he’s already pledged not vote for Nancy Pelosi as
Speaker of the House…
What else won’t Lamb vote for? Any
restrictions on abortion, including the recent GOP proposal to limit late-term
abortions -- specifically abortions after 20 weeks when, according to
overwhelming scientific evidence, babies in the womb can experience pain.
“[Catholics] believe that life begins at
conception,” he told The Weekly Standard, “but as a matter of separation of church
and state, I think a woman has the right to choose under the law.”
So Lamb’s not afraid to tell the top House
Democrat to take a hike, but he’s too timid to vote his conscience on late-term
abortions? Why? Because Planned Parenthood is the NRA of the Democratic Party.
Only worse.
For the unborn, a scalpel is considered an
assault weapon. We are told the abortion involves the right to choose. No
child, whether in a school or in a womb, chooses death. All have an unalienable
right to life All should be mourned and all who kill them should be despised.
Daniel John Sobieski is a
freelance writer whose pieces have appeared inInvestor’s
Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the
ChicagoSun-Times among other publications.
March 10, 2018
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