Planned Parenthood announced on Monday that the organization will voluntarily withdraw from the federally-funded Title X Program, which provides family planning services to low-income individuals. The decision is due to the enforcement of a finalized rule by President Trump’s Health and Human Services Department specifying that organizations providing family planning services and receiving federal funding for that purpose may not commit or refer for abortions. This rule seeks to enforce a stated goal of the Title X program–preventing tax dollars from subsidizing the destruction of innocent human Life–by requiring that family planning providers receiving federal funding be both financially and physically separate from entities that commit abortions because of funding fungibility. Planned Parenthood receives about $60 million every year through the Title X Program, though this accounts for only about 15% of the organization’s overall federal funding.
Though the rule was slated to take effect on May 3, 2019, implementation has been delayed due to litigation. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled previously that the administration could move forward on enforcing the rule. Despite Planned Parenthood appealing the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, on Friday the court declined to do so, allowing the Trump administration’s rule to stand.
This life-affirming rule has forced Planned Parenthood to reveal their true colors as an abortion giant that will always place profiting off of the mass killing of innocent human beings before providing healthcare services to low-income women. Their decision to remove themselves from the federal program rather than comply with the new rules is telling. On the one hand, the Planned Parenthood abortion giant prioritizes abortion; on the other hand, they claim that providing other types of women’s healthcare is integral to their organization, with abortion comprising only 3%. By exiting entirely from the Title X Program rather than complying with the new rule, Planned Parenthood has made perfectly clear that their true priority is profiting from elective abortion on demand.
Planned Parenthood is attempting to spin their decision to leave the Title X Program as a “forced exit” caused by Pro-Life President Trump. However, if the abortion giant would choose merely to separate the actual healthcare they provide from their abortion business, the rule would not be an issue. The rule does not diminish federal family planning funding at all, simply serving to ensure that dollars allocated for healthcare are indeed used for that purpose, not for the killing of innocent preborn children. Planned Parenthood claims to care about women’s healthcare and providing services other than abortion, but for an organization that commits more than 300,000 abortions every year, apparently separating family planning from abortion for the sake of continuing to provide those other services was too much to ask.
Despite this encouraging step toward removing the flow of public funding to Planned Parenthood through one federal program, there is yet another, greater federal funding stream by which Planned Parenthood receives tax dollars. An overwhelming majority of the federal funding Planned Parenthood receives each year is through Medicaid reimbursements, to the tune of approximately $500 million each year. Cutting off this funding stream by removing Planned Parenthood as a Medicaid provider has been attempted in various states, including Texas, and resulting court cases are now working their way through the judicial system. Although today’s announcement of Planned Parenthood’s decision to leave the Title X program is a victory, there is still more that must be done at the state and federal levels to fully defund the industry of death.
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