“After her final day as president of abortion provider Planned Parenthood Monday, thousands of people took to social media to celebrate Cecile Richards and thank her for killing 3.5 million people during her tenure.” Or at least that’s the way The Babylon Bee satirically “reported” this week. The Bee went on, “The nation offered kind remarks on Richards’ positive attitude, support for women’s rights, and ruthless genocidal efficiency.”

In reality, Richards was celebrated by abortion advocates and Planned Parenthood supporters who gushed on social media over her contributions to the organization.

Reflecting on her catastrophic tenure, Richards opined, “12 years ago, I almost didn’t go to the job interview at Planned Parenthood. I had a long list of reasons why I wasn’t qualified. So I did what any grown woman would do: I called my mom. [Former Texas Gov.] Ann Richards wasn’t having it — she told me to get a grip, and thank goodness she did!”

“Thank goodness”?

It must be nice to have had an opportunity to live a full life and reach out to her mom for guidance. Except Richards denied this same right to millions of innocent babies over the last 12 years — children who never got a chance to gaze lovingly into either of their parents’ eyes, much less ask for advice.

Sure, we’re often told that Planned Parenthood is an organization whose primary mission is to provide women’s health services, but its website offers an in-clinic abortion service as though one were simply dropping an item in an Amazon shopping cart.

Some of the reasons listed on Planned Parenthood’s website for women seeking an abortion include not wanting to be a parent, wanting to be the best parent possible to an older child, and wanting to achieve other goals before having a baby.

In other words, a prospective mother who’d really rather go backpacking in Europe this summer or who isn’t quite ready to give up the single life can simply drop by the clinic and irrevocably end the life of that little human being kicking around in her belly.

It’d be one thing for a private baby-killing operation to fund itself via donations from heartless groups and individuals (although even that scenario would be chilling and reprehensible). But forcing millions of decent, hard-working Americans to kick in $500 million per year in public funding to do the same is an outrage for a nation founded upon Judeo-Christian values and the unalienable rights of every human being to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

During the decade-plus in which Richards led the organization and raked in a seven-figure salary, Planned Parenthood took in billions in taxpayer dollars. Yet during this time, women’s health services fell dramatically while the number of aborted children skyrocketed. The Daily Wire reports that Planned Parenthood “saw huge drops in patient numbers and actual health services and scandal after scandal involving aborted baby body parts trafficking, sexual abuse cover-ups, Medicaid fraud and more.”

Although many pro-life Americans were dismayed by the omnibus spending bill signed into law by President Donald Trump earlier this spring, there are some encouraging signs. Peter Sullivan at The Hill writes, “More than 85 anti-abortion groups signed a letter Tuesday saying that the family planning money, known as Title X, should not go to Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform or refer women for abortions. This shift would reinstate a regulation put in place by President Reagan.”

House and Senate Republicans are also putting some pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to make changes to Title X.

Pro-life senators recently asked Azar to “restore the regulations issued on February 2, 1988 (53 FR 2922) which clarified that Title X programs may not promote, counsel, or refer clients for abortion or co-locate or combine family planning services with abortion activities. These rules required not only complete financial separation, but also physical separation of abortion activities from Title X service sites and separate personnel.”

Ridding family-planning centers of abortion would be a small but significant step in restoring the focus on families rather than the murder of babies before birth. You know — actually planning parenthood.

Naturally, Planned Parenthood has decried the effort to change Title X as a “threat” to women’s health and is suing to stop it. But we mustn’t continue to fall for this lie. For example, the organization’s supporters — including Barack Obama — have long touted mammograms as an important service offered at its locations, but in 2015 Cecile Richards appeared before a congressional committee and admitted, “We do not have mammogram machines at our health centers.”

But this is nothing new for Planned Parenthood. The objective has always been to keep the truth from getting out — whether it’s about health services or targeting minority populations. As Margaret Sanger, the eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood, said in 1939, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

In the Information Age, however, and with tens of millions of lives having already been lost, the organization can no longer stop the word from getting out. The real and ruthless mission of Planned Parenthood has been exposed, and it’s long past time to cut off public funding of this brutal butchery.