Which would you rather pay for: a baby shower or a funeral? That’s the very real choice facing taxpayers in the health care debate today. By defunding Planned Parenthood, Americans could celebrate the arrival of thousands more babies or fail and find themselves back where they’ve been: financially shackled to the culture of death. Either way, liberals warn, there’s a cost.

Pulling the plug on the nation’s biggest abortion business, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, would mean “The number of births in the Medicaid program would increase by several thousand, increasing direct spending for Medicaid by $21 million in 2017 and by $77 million over the 2017-2026 period.” That sounds like a lot of money until you consider that these same children will be pouring far more into the economy and workforce later on. And while the Left will argue that we can’t afford to encourage these births, research by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) proves we can’t afford not to.

Human capital is one of the driving forces of the economy. That human capital — our children — grows up to be our nation’s workers, its taxpayers, and its consumers. In more technical terms, former FRC expert Dr. Henry Potrykus found that “Overall GDP growth in the United States has been lagging for more than 50 years, a phenomenon known as the ‘growth slowdown.’ Human capital considerations, when they are tied to the demographics of the working population, explain this.” Think about it. In the last four decades, Americans have reduced the labor force by 58 million people through abortion alone. “The slowdown of GDP growth,” Henry elaborates, “is explained by the concentration of both population and human capital in the baby boom, which is now being replaced by lower human capital cohorts.”

He predicts that “the U.S. economy will continue to sputter over the coming years. This slowdown is amplified by the retiring of a generation with significant human capital (the baby boom) and its replacement by a generation inadequate in population size to continue the expected and required growth of the macro-economy.” Whatever investment the government makes to encourage these births is a small price to pay for the enormous return later — and not just economically, but in innovation and ingenuity.

Still, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards’s says, any legislation promoting childbirth is “dangerous” and “must be stopped.” Even more shocking, she tweets, “Planned Parenthood is proud to provide abortion — a necessary service that’s vital to our mission.” So vital, apparently, that it’s willing to spend $1 million pressuring the White House to reconsider its position. (How many taxpayer dollars is it spending to defend taxpayer dollars?) “We want to hit in the heart of the Trump coalition,” a spokesperson said, announcing their intent to blanket red states with ads. With roughly half of the organization’s funding on the line, Richards is pulling out all the stops to repackage the group as a compassionate, cancer-curing women’s health organization.

There’s just one problem: The statistics tell a different story. Just a quick glance through FRC’s Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet will have you shaking your head in disgust. Liberals love to repeat the line that abortion is just three percent of Richards’s business — a number Slate’s Rachael Larimore called the “most meaningless abortion statistic ever … to the point of being downright silly.” The Washington Post didn’t pull any punches either, calling it “misleading.” Even National Public Radio called out the group for the lie, suggesting that a more accurate percentage of Planned Parenthood clients who have an abortion would be 10 percent. That’s not hard to imagine. In 2014, if a pregnant woman walked into a Planned Parenthood facility, she was 160 times more likely to receive an abortion than an adoption referral.

As for those cancer screenings the group claims is so central to its work, its own annual reports refute them. “From 2009 to 2014, cancer screening and prevention programs have consistently decreased, and dropped by close to two-thirds (63 percent): 1,830,811 (2009), 1,596,741 (2010), 1,307,570 (2011), 1,121,580 (2012), 935,573 (2013), and 682,208 (2014). Despite the 63 percent decrease in screening services, Planned Parenthood continues to tout its screening efforts as a major part of their public advertising.”

In the end, no one is suggesting that women go without the care they so desperately need. President Trump, congressional Republicans, and the majority of Americans are simply asking that they get it from community health centers — which not only serve 18 million more people a year but don’t perform abortions. And unlike Planned Parenthood, they have the added benefit of not being referred for criminal prosecution by the U.S. House! Here’s the bottom line: If thousands of nonprofits can perform quality community outreach without $550 million in taxpayer funds, so can Planned Parenthood.

Originally published here.

Saint Patrick Helps SB 6 through TX House

Halfway home! That’s the status of the most important privacy bill of the year: Texas’s SB 6. After an emotional five hours of debate, state senators — led by the measure’s author, Senator Lois Kolkhorst (R) — heeded the call of parents, pastors, and employers and voted overwhelmingly to bring the Privacy Act one step closer to reality. By a vote of 21 (including Democrat Eddie Lucio) to 10, Texas sent a message to the rest of the country it wasn’t about to back down when the safety of women and children is at stake.

Senator Kolkhorst, who, like Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (R), has been a rock in the face of some of the fiercest opposition, said, “I will tell you as a woman, this is not a joke. This is about dressing rooms, lockers, showers, and restrooms. This is about privacy and protection for all people. It’s not perfect. It’s not easy when we take about these issues.” But, she went on, leaders had to be vigilant — not about people who identify as transgender, but predators who “might in some way use a vague idea of gender identification to go into a private and intimate spaces and do harm.” Like us, she understands that this isn’t just about responding to threats from the federal government (like President Obama’s school mandate) but from local governments and school districts in Texas that might try to elevate “gender identity” over biological sex. We congratulate the state senate for putting Texans’ safety first!

Now that the bill has cleared one hurdle, the biggest remains. After a formal reading of the text, SB 6 heads to the state house, where its loudest critics hold the key to its fate. Join us in telling Speaker Joe Straus that it’s time to take the concerns of parents and their children seriously and bring the bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote. In the meantime, all the attention may be on Texas, but chances are, plenty of you live in states debating the same issue. Make sure your voices are heard in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Washington!

Originally published here.

State Department Challenged on State Deportment

The liberal agenda is no respecter of countries! Billionaire activist George Soros has certainly proven that, as he takes his mission to the far ends of the globe — with help, it seems, from U.S. taxpayers. Members of the U.S. Senate are now echoing concerns that FRC raised in January about the Left intruding in other countries’ business — often in opposition to American policy. In particular, the group writes in a letter to new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) seems to be fronting left-wing political groups in other countries. Leading the parade, it points out, is “multi-grant recipient, the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations.”

In Macedonia, the problem is particularly acute. “The USAID website shows that between 2012 and 2016, USAID gave almost $5 million in taxpayer cash to … ‘The Civil Society Project,’ which ‘aims to empower Macedonian citizens to hold government accountable.’ USAID’s website links to www.soros.org.mk, and says the project trained hundreds of young Macedonians ‘in youth activism and the use of new media instruments.’” Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who is helping to lead the call for an investigation, also pointed out, “Respected leaders from Albania have made similar claims of U.S. diplomats and Soros-backed organizations pushing for certain political outcomes in their country,” the letter said, citing a FOSM-backed push for Albanian judicial reform, which opponents say are aimed to give the socialist government full control over the country’s judiciary.

Unfortunately, the Left’s meddling in other countries’ affairs is nothing new. Under the Obama administration, Secretaries Hillary Clinton and John Kerry made it their job to bully other nations into accepting the Left’s twisted agenda on marriage and sexuality. Just recently, a group of hundreds of Caribbean pastors pleaded with the Trump administration to stop the cycle of financial blackmail from the Obama administration. “We were coerced into accepting [the administration’s LGBT] agenda, threatening fund withdrawal and a number of other things. And our governments are under severe pressure to relent. We now see a ray of hope under President Trump and Vice President Pence, where some of this can be reversed…”

In this case, the six senators write, the intrusion takes several forms. “This includes reports of diplomats playing political favorites, USAID funds supporting extreme and sometimes violent political activists, and the US Government working to marginalize the moderates and conservatives in leadership roles… This sort of political favoritism from our missions around the world is unacceptable.” Signed by Senators Lee, Thom Tillis (R-NC), James Inhofe (R-OK), David Perdue (R-GA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and Ted Cruz (R-TX), the group asks Tillerson to dig deeper into “all funds associated with promoting democracy and governance and review the programs, accounts, and multiplicity of U.S. entities involved in such activities.”

America spent eight years alienating other countries with Obama’s heavy-handed ideas of “diplomacy.” It’s time to turn the page on that embarrassing chapter of foreign relations and start respecting our neighbors’ differences.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.