Most Americans support Planned Parenthood. Defunding it could backfire on Republicans politically. Why do they keep trying anyway?
Jan 12, 2017, 6:10 PM UTC
Republicans in Congress are taking the first of three steps necessary to repeal the Affordable Care Act: The Senate passed the budget resolution to start that process at 1 am on Thursday, and the House is expected to do the same on Friday.
And as they work to repeal the ACA, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan promised last week that Republicans in Congress also plan to defund Planned Parenthood.
The GOP has been trying for years to do both of these things, and now they have the chance to make both happen in one fell swoop — through a process that Democrats will be powerless to stop on their own.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is working out the details of the Planned Parenthood defunding bill, Ryan’s office told Vox, and the committee hasn’t released those details yet. One possible model could be a bill that passed the House last year, which prohibits Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds for one year, unless its affiliates and clinics stop performing abortions.
There are a few variations on how such a bill could work, or which particular funding streams it would target. But any bill that takes away all or part of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding would be devastating to women’s health and would gut the nation’s family planning safety net.
In some respects, the move is puzzling. Most Americans, including nearly half of Trump voters, oppose defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest family planning provider. One in five US women have visited a Planned Parenthood clinic for services like birth control, cancer screenings, STD tests, or pregnancy termination.
Perhaps even more to the point, defunding Planned Parenthood could backfire on Republicans politically. Republicans have threatened a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding before, in 2011 and 2015, but they were ultimately forced to back down — mostly because Democrats in the Senate and President Obama were a firewall.
But even now, with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency, it could be a bad move. Republicans need at least 50 of their 52 senators to pass the ACA repeal through the budget reconciliation process — and two pro-choice Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, won’t commit to voting for the ACA repeal if Planned Parenthood defunding is attached. Just one more Republican defector on top of that (Rand Paul is a likely choice) could make the whole thing a nonstarter.
So why target Planned Parenthood at all? In a broader context, the answer is simple: Planned Parenthood has become a proxy battle for a much bigger, decades-long war over legal abortion. And as a result of that war, other family planning services like birth control and cancer screenings are becoming collateral damage.
