Does This Mean Planned Parenthood Is Breaking the Law?
Planned Parenthood (PP) does a few things well. It ends pregnancies and chases taxpayer dollars. The organization overpays executives, dumps obscene sums into lobbying to get more tax dollars, and runs as a non-profit NGO that pays no taxes. And it complains about funding.
In recent years, it jumped on the drug-our-children-train, offering gender services (access to hormone therapy and surgical referrals), sometimes without parental knowledge or consent. But the thing it has always been known for is killing babies, and getting Democrats to show us why anger management classes are a thing.
Any effort to send less funding to PP makes them pop like a champagne cork, so this news might interrupt their Tesla burning spree for a heartbeat or two.
The Trump administration is moving to freeze tens of millions of dollars in federal family-planning grants to certain organizations while it investigates whether the money was used for diversity efforts, people familiar with the matter said.
The Health and Human Services Department is weighing an immediate freeze of $27.5 million in grants, an agency spokesman said after The Wall Street Journal reported the plans.
The Administration is immediately pilloried by those who benefit financially from tens of millions of other people’s hard-earned dollars.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said: “The Trump-Vance-Musk administration wants to shut down Planned Parenthood health centers by any means necessary, and they’ll end people’s access to birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and more to do it.”
What’s got you so worried, Alexis?
The Administration is “reviewing grant recipients to make sure they comply with President Trump’s executive orders and federal law. ”
Instead of saying PP will pass any audit and get the funds for everything it claims to do, Alexis is jumping straight to a defensive emotional appeal.
Is Planned Parenthood breaking the law? If not, why gripe, and if so, no one should sympathize with its well-heeled execs and deep-pocketed lobbyists who take their pay without concern for ensuring their offerings are available to the people for whom they claim to care so much. So much that in 2019 they willingly gave up federal funding because they could not separate abortion services from family planning, and they wanted to do abortions, which then PP President Leanna Wen said was its core business.
It also seems arrogant to suggest that no one else can provide any or all of these services you claim to offer, or that no one will rise to the challenge of accessing available funding to provide them. And there’s the rub. HHS isn’t saying, we refuse to fund “access to birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment.” To which we could add ultrasounds, adoption services, post abortion counseling (for women who choose a legal abortion), or pregnancy support and parenting classes, or couples for those moms and dads who decide to keep their baby. Planned parenthood doesn’t offer any of the latter, but I bet $27.5 million could do a lot of good for people who need any or all of that, assuming they follow the law.
They could also provide significantly more access.
Planned Parenthood has about 700 affiliated “health care centers” in the US, but there are over 2600 Pregnancy Care centers and 14,250 urgent care centers in the United States. The latter are staffed with actual doctors and nurses, and most, if not all, are affiliated with nearby hospitals. They all likely meet the more stringent state or federal public health facility requirements, keep better records, and are exponentially safer than most, if not all, PP “clinics.”
How exactly is the community not served if HHS diverts that funding to nearly 15,000 locations that can provide a greater diversity of actual medical services to women, as well as mental health, adoption, or parenting support?
Women’s health care, especially family planning care, isn’t just about condoms, STDs, and ending pregnancies, none of which matters for any “clinic” that is following the law. But based on Alexis’ whining, I’m going to guess that perhaps Planned Parenthood may not be, aren’t, or won’t, so who is defunding whom?
