There’s probably no horror on earth that compares to being sexually abused. For women like the one who wrote to the atheist website Sheologians, it was a nightmare that will take a lifetime of healing. And in a heart-wrenching email, she says that healing didn’t start at Planned Parenthood. After realizing she was pregnant from the rape, she went to the place she “had been told all her life to go when seeking help with an unplanned pregnancy.” In the message, read in a powerful video by Summer White, she said she was certain Planned Parenthood would give her all the help she needed to give her baby up for adoption. “That’s not what I found,” she writes.

After she turned in the paperwork explaining her intent, “everything changed.” She was left for an hour in the waiting room and ignored by staff. When the clinic workers finally got around to seeing her, she was strongly pressured to abort. “She kept telling me about my rights. About how empowered I would feel. How I would be taking control of my own body, and taking back what had been taken from me,” reads White. “They wouldn’t offer me an ultrasound,” she continued. “Counseling was only for those getting an abortion.” When the woman tried to get information on adoption, she was told “her baby would likely grow up to be a drug user, or a rapist. She was told that her baby, having been conceived from rape, would be harder to adopt. That no one would want her baby.”

If that sickens you, it should. This is the kind of “care” you’re funding as a U.S. taxpayer. And it’s just one of $550,000,000 reasons Congress is fighting to sever ties from America’s biggest abortion business. For too long, the U.S. government has lined the pockets of Planned Parenthood under the guise of “women’s health care” — when, as we see from real-life stories like this one, the only “health” that matters to Cecile Richards is the group’s financials. If a pregnant woman walked into a Planned Parenthood facility today, she’d be 160 times more likely to receive an abortion than an adoption referral. Why? Because to this organization, it’s all about the money. And Planned Parenthood doesn’t make any of it encouraging adoption. Thankfully, conservatives in Congress are doing everything they can to ensure it doesn’t make any of it from the federal government either.

In the American Health Care Act, the plan to replace Obamacare, the White House and U.S. House are both adamant that we end the forced partnership between taxpayers and the abortion industry. Under the text being considered in the House Budget Committee today, not only would Congress gut a significant chunk of Planned Parenthood’s funding — about 80 percent — but the new tax credits couldn’t be used on plans that cover elective abortion. While there are some snags with how the health savings accounts handle abortion, FRC has already been working to fix that loophole with Hill leaders.

Although some liberals are trying to spook conservatives from including the pro-life provisions in the bill, most Republicans are more frightened of the support they’d lose if they didn’t. The conservative movement, from outside groups like FRC to the powerful groups like the House Freedom Caucus inside, will not budge on their conviction that the bill shouldn’t include taxpayer-funded abortion in any form or fashion.

Originally published here.

Return to Spender, Address Unknown

They call it a “skinny” budget and Donald Trump’s was — in more ways than one! There’s a new sheriff in town, and the White House’s budget proves it with deep cuts to some of the government’s bloated spending. Although the proposal is more of an exercise in vision-casting, plenty of Republicans would be happy to take Trump’s pared down projects seriously. To the cheers of fiscal hawks, the administration suggests cutting the EPA by 31 percent and the State Department by a similar amount. A longer list of programs like community development block grants, the Weatherization Assistance Program, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program would be cut 100 percent. Included in that bunch are two longtime targets of the GOP: the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The latter, home to the Left’s pet media outlets NPR and PBS, would finally lose the crutch of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, said all of these cuts came down to a simple formula. “When you start looking at places that we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was, can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” The military and immigration enforcement were among the few places where President Trump boosted funding, along with a dramatic shift in favor of school choice programs. While he slashes $9.2 billion from the Department of Education overall, he makes good on his campaign promise to expand charter schools and vouchers by 50 percent.

When the administration fills in the blanks of the budget later this month, we’ll also see if the White House rewards sexual risk avoidance programs with a bump in abstinence education dollars. Unlike some members of Congress, who load up on earmarks in exchange for certain groups’ support, “The president’s beholden to nobody but the people who elected him, and yes, I understand that every lawmaker over there has pet projects,” Mulvaney told reporters. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

For now, conservatives should be more than pleased with the overall direction of Trump’s government. While we’re still digging into the details, the fact that Trump is trying to cut spending and defund the germinators of taxpayer-funded liberalism is very encouraging.

Originally published here.

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