How to Destroy Your Own Cause: Planned Parenthood and the Obama Administration

After the failed attempt to de-fund Planned Parenthood (PP) nationally in Congress, Indiana made history last May by passing a bill that prevents health care centers that perform abortions from receiving state taxpayer funds. (As of today, Kansas and Texas have done the same.)

PP is a self-described “reproductive health care”* center that performs roughly 25%** of all abortions in the USA. Understandably, PP and its supporters don’t take kindly to even remotely pro-life legislation, and this bill was no exception.

One of PP’s strongest supporters is the Obama Administration. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but what did surprise me is how the Obama Administration reacted to this bill. One of PP’s most cited arguments against being de-funded is that minorities and the poor will lose access to vital, life-saving health care. Assuming they really believe this, you would think PP would protest what the Obama Administration did to attack this bill. After claiming that states don’t have the right to restrict Medicaid on a state level, the Obama Administration is now threatening to cut billions of dollars of Medicaid funding specifically for low income people in Indiana if Indiana doesn’t revoke the bill.

Now, how much sense does this make? PP shouldn’t be de-funded because it helps minorities and poor people, therefore we should cut billions of dollars of funding that helps minorities and poor people? Huh? I can only assume that the Obama Administration is hoping to be able to pin the blame on Indiana, like the childish quip, “I TOLD you I would hit you if you didn’t give me my toy! It’s your own fault! Nyah nyah nyah!” (Never mind that the toy may actually be Indiana’s in the first place.)

I can post in more detail later about the controversy surrounding de-funding PP and PP itself, but this struck me as so outrageously absurd and contradictory to the supposed beliefs of PP and its supporters that I thought it merited a short post all of its own.

*From the Planned Parenthood website.
**For some reason I couldn’t find an abortion estimation in the USA past 2008, so I calculated using what seems about the average, 1.2 million, and Planned Parenthood’s fact sheet from 2010 (page 2).