Planned Parenthood started freaking out the minute House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Thursday afternoon that a forthcoming Republican alternative to Obamacare will come hand-in-hand with defunding Planned Parenthood.
And it. Was. Glorious.
During a press briefing Thursday, Ryan reiterated that the congressional GOP was committed to repealing and replacing President Obama’s disastrous health care law, which has been a picnic for just about no one (see here, here, here and here). While they’re taking out the trash, Republicans also plan to “defund” Planned Parenthood (i.e., exempting it from the federal Medicaid program so it can't be reimbursed for its services using taxpayer dollars), Ryan added.
Ryan’s announcement came just after the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives released its 418-page report detailing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in providing fetal tissue to researchers, including evidence that procurement companies such as StemExpress were profiting handsomely from the sale and trade of organs taken from aborted babies and purchased from Planned Parenthood. The panel recommended Congress implement ethical guidelines with regard to tissue harvested from aborted babies before recommending that Congress defund Planned Parenthood.
The abortion giant ignited a mile-a-minute twitterstorm immediately after Ryan stepped off the podium Thursday, claiming that stripping the government-subsidized organization of its yearly $500 million-plus in taxpayer funding would leave millions of women without healthcare.
Then again, it would also make it much harder for Planned Parenthood to systemically exterminate more than 300,000 children each year.
“Let’s call this attack what it really is: An attempt to shut down a health care provider for political reasons,” PP tweeted out, painting a doomsday prediction of a nation in crisis if Congress turns off the federal spigots to its bulging bank account (its president makes over half a million a year, FYI).
These attacks on access to health care are wildly unpopular & would create a national health disaster. #MakeAmericaSickAgain
— Planned Parenthood (@PPact) January 5, 2017
In the same bill, @SpeakerRyan wants to both repeal the #ACA & defund Planned Parenthood – leaving many women with ZERO healthcare options. https://t.co/ci0qqiClmp
— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) January 5, 2017
Unmentioned in any of the group’s tweets are a few simple, key data points: namely, that Planned Parenthood only operates around 650 health care centers across the entire nation. Other local clinics, which are exponentially more abundant, offer many of the same exact services, including birth control, pap smears and STD testing.
And this just in: the country won’t fall to a billion shattered pieces if 650 clinics get shut down.
Additionally, most other clinics also offer lifesaving services that Planned Parenthood doesn’t, such as mammograms. (In fact, Planned Parenthood, which claims to want nothing but accessible health care for all women, has a shady history of targeting pro-life clinics that offer more health services for less.)
Planned Parenthood also fails to mention that about 80 percent of its clinics are located in low-income, minority-populated urban areas – areas that are also serviced by multiple other health care providers, including many who do accept Medicaid. In fact, Charles Camosy, associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University, lays out here how community health care centers are much more capable of caring for women than Planned Parenthood, particularly for those women who don’t live in cities. Removing Planned Parenthood doesn’t limit these women from getting health care access – only from getting to the clinic that preys on them the most.