Women's Health Advocates Unfazed By GOP's War On Planned Parenthood The coalition of pro-choice groups and members of Congress gathered on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and effectively told Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) where he can put his plan to eliminate all federal funding of Planned Parenthood.
Pence has long called for an end to federal spending on the family planning organization, which receives about $360 million a year in taxpayer money from federal, state and local governments. Federal funds cannot be used for abortion, and are earmarked for family planning, cancer screenings and other women's health services.
A portion of that care falls under the so-called "Title X" provisions of the Public Health Service Act, a law that provides federal funding for family planning -- but not abortion, which cannot be paid for with federal money except in very strict circumstances, such as pregnancies resulting from rape. In their zeal to trim federal spending -- and, according to women's rights advocates on the Hill and elsewhere, as part of a plan to eliminate funding for contraception all together -- Republicans have eliminated Title X funding from their budget proposal.
Sometimes I cannot believe that we are actually at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century when I look at how the Republicans want to keep women suppressed....and how many women let them!
