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Joshua Arnold | The Washington Stand
Pro-life forces in Congress have a once-in-a-decade opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood, but the road ahead is far from easy. Before scaling an avalanche of media disapproval, then hurdling a potentially adverse ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, pro-lifers must first navigate the measure between the forbidding cliffs that are constraining the GOP’s historically narrow House majority. House moderates are making that last task extremely difficult.
The simmering tension boiled over “in a Tuesday evening closed door meeting between Speaker Mike Johnson [R-La.], House Majority Leader Steve Scalise [R-La.], and some moderate Republicans,” NOTUS reported. However, neither Johnson nor other members present were willing to discuss what happened in the meeting with them.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) said beforehand that he planned to raise the issue in the meeting, arguing that “we need simplicity in this bill.” According to NOTUS’s anonymous sources, Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) were also among the members opposed to cutting Planned Parenthood funding through reconciliation. Kiggans’s office vehemently contested the report, calling it “false.”
Johnson has publicly promised that the reconciliation bill “is going to redirect funds away from ‘big abortion.’” This is consistent with President Trump’s stated goal of returning abortion policy back to the states.
Getting the federal government out of the business of setting abortion policy is hard to do while the federal government continues to subsidize the nation’s largest abortion supplier. In 2023 (the latest report available), the Government Accountability Office calculated that, in the three-year span from 2019-2021, Planned Parenthood affiliates received approximately $1.8 billion from the federal government, through HHS grants, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP payments, Paycheck Protection Program loans, and even USAID.
Yet the effort to excise “big abortion’s” slush fund stands in danger of faltering over intra-party squabbles. This is an appropriate time for President Trump to step in and unite the GOP, argued National Review’s Dan McLaughlin.
“There’s a time and place in partisan politics for a big-tent approach to letting legislators vote their consciences or their districts (which are often not the same things), and there’s a time and place for demanding that people stand with the party’s principles and priorities,” he argued.
“Even for those Republicans who don’t care all that much about the moral issues, the group is for all intents and purposes an arm of the Democratic Party,” McLaughlin added. “Trump’s second term should send a message that Democratic and progressive groups no longer have a permanent entitlement to taxpayer financing that is immune to the outcomes of elections.”
This point of partisan expediency should resonate with the policies pursued by the second Trump administration so far. Defunding Planned Parenthood is no different than cancelling DEI grants, pulling university funding over blatant anti-Semitism, or shutting the spigots of USAID to leftist NGOs. The point is that left-wing organizations have enjoyed unfair advantages for decades, and they should be de-subsidized.
At least one moderate Republican understands this. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said he is “not opposed” to defunding Planned Parenthood through reconciliation. “A lot of people in my district don’t like money going to organizations that do abortion — taxpayer money,” he said.
“Planned Parenthood is a massive abortion provider,” Bacon added. “They also are very political, so, [we’re] giving them taxpayer money, and then they turn around and attack us.”
If this argument persuades one moderate Republican, it stands a chance of persuading others.
Amid this debate, newly released audio from Live Action reminds America that Planned Parenthood is evil not only for perpetrating the mass destruction of unborn lives but also for its predatory provision of gender transition procedures to minors.
In the recording, a Live Action investigator posed as a 16-year-old girl seeking a testosterone prescription. The investigator called multiple Planned Parenthood facilities in Minnesota and New York. Multiple facilities said they would prescribe cross-sex hormones to a minor. Multiple facilities were willing to schedule virtual appointments. Multiple facilities said they required no documentation that the presumed minor had attended therapy. Multiple facilities were willing to write a prescription for cross-sex hormones on the very same day as their first visit with the minor.
This is the very opposite of good medical practice. Planned Parenthood is willing to prescribe extreme physical interventions with irreversible effects for a psychological condition. They are willing to do so without physically examining the patient, without monitoring the patient over a period of time, and without even attempting therapy to construct a holistic picture of the patient’s condition. They are even willing to do these things to minors.
This second evil is one that the Trump administration has moved aggressively to counter. Thankfully, President Trump has issued an executive order defining “man” and “woman” in biological terms. Executive departments from HHS to DOD to Agriculture have acted to implement this executive order throughout the federal government.
Purging federal funding from an organization that actively promotes and profits from transgender ideology is simply the next step on a trail the Trump administration has already blazed.
President Trump has shown that this is one fight from which he will not back down. His administration has successfully fought activist judges to re-implement his military transgender policy. It has tackled states like Maine for allowing men to compete in women’s sports. The next item of business is for the Trump administration to lean on members of his own party in Congress, so that the federal government no longer has to subsidize an organization that actively pushes a transgender ideology on children.
