The Patriot Post® · Spending $500 Million to Deprive Children of Life

During the five-plus hours Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards spent before a congressional hearing on Tuesday, her organization had time to kill more than 185 babies.

Unfortunately, while debating whether the abortion mill should continue to receive more than $500 million annually in taxpayer dollars, Republicans, who rightfully called the hearing, asked the wrong question: “Does Planned Parenthood really need federal subsidies?”

Instead, they should have gotten to the crux of the issue: Does the Constitution authorize spending money to deprive children of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

The correct answer is, of course, no.

Were the right question asked — and correctly answered — the hearing could have begun and ended in five minutes. But since Republicans went down the road of financial “need,” let’s take a look at those numbers.

Far from being a health clinic chain desperate for federal dollars, Planned Parenthood is a massive profit machine, grossing nearly $1.3 billion annually and holding $1.4 billion in assets. Richards herself pocketed pay of more than $590,000 in 2013, while more than 40 other Planned Parenthood execs make more than $200,000.

Richards admitted she “can’t think of a specific impact” of losing taxpayer dollars. We can think of 327,000 specific impacts.

(Incidentally, Richards also couldn’t think of any instances in which unborn children survive abortions. It’s amazing the sudden onset of amnesia a congressional hearing can spur.)

But back to funding, Planned Parenthood doesn’t “just get a big check from the federal government,” Richards said. “We, like other Medicaid providers, we are reimbursed directly for services provided.” And pulling federal funding “would deny people on Medicaid the ability to go to a provider of their choice, and many of them do go to Planned Parenthood for a variety of different reasons.”

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, public expenditures for family planning exceeded $2.3 billion in FY 2010 — and 75% of this went toward Medicaid. It’s all part of the Title X Family Planning Program, enacted in 1970, in accordance with Article Nil, Section Nonexistent of the Constitution. This funding purportedly supports a variety of family planning and preventative health services.

Of course, for Planned Parenthood, this “variety” does not include basic women’s health services like mammograms — no matter how many times its defenders lie about that particular service.

Perhaps this is why Richards herself does not rely on Planned Parenthood for her own health care.

In fact, if Richards is to be believed (cue: sarcasm), just a teeny weeny bit of this “variety” is abortion. According to Richards, Planned Parenthood’s 327,000 annual abortions are just 3% of the health services offered by its clinics.

Hmm, that’s odd. Richards herself has said Planned Parenthood serves 2.7 million women each year. Do the math on how many abortions they perform, and the percentage would mean they serve closer to 12 million. Not only this, but as Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) noted during the hearing, more than 86% of Planned Parenthood’s non-government revenue in 2013 came from abortions.

Even Common Core math can’t make 86 equal anything close to 3.

Still, Richards attempted to skirt the truth, explaining that some people come to Planned Parenthood “more than once for different services.” And she pulled the famous “federal money does not go for abortions” lie, saying, “So the federal portion that we were discussing is reimbursement for preventative care services.” Perhaps in fantasyland she’s right, but saying taxpayer money doesn’t fund abortions is like saying you can pour a bucket of water in the deep end of a pool and keep it out of the shallow end. The taxpayer dollars doled to Planned Parenthood are entirely fungible — and paying for some services allows the abortion mill to divert other resources to practice its primary and deadly trade.

In truth, Richards and her corporation masked as a non-profit organization are cashing in — at the expense of taxpayers — on the blood and body parts of innocent babies. And how tightly Planned Parenthood is holding onto its rhetoric of lies shows just how much their factories of death stand to lose.