Rep. Kristi Noem hasn't thrown her support behind the Violence Against Women Act that passed the Senate with bipartisan support last week. But she has signed on as a co-sponsor to a measure to take away funding from women's health care. Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) has filed HR 217, which takes another stab at defunding Planned Parenthood and any other entity that performs abortions. HR 217 exempts hospitals and entities performing abortions in cases of rape, incest, and risk of death of the mother.
Planned Parenthood received $542 million in public support last year, including all federal, state, and local money. That's 45% of the organization's revenue. Here's the breakdown of the services Planned Parenthood provides:
Abortions make up 3% of the services Planned Parenthood provides, just as when Ezra Klein reported on this issue last year. According to the latest annual report, in 2011, Planned Parenthood provided nearly eleven million services to about three million patients over nearly five million clinic visits. By the numbers, Planned Parenthood provided...
- 4,475,013 STI/STD tests and treatments for women and men,
- 3,436,813 contraceptive services (including 3,575 vasectomy clients),
- 1,307,570 cancer tests and preventive treatments,
- 1,150,589 pregnancy tests,
- 28,674 prenatal services,
- 333,964 abortions, and
- 132,036 other services.
HR 217 only takes away Title X money, which is dedicated to family planning and preventive health services and which by law cannot be used for abortions. The bill would not reduce the number of abortions; it would take cancer screenings, STD testing and contraception away from poor people and would lead to more unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
Like Senator John Thune and other Republicans, Rep. Noem is thus willing to take away useful non-abortion health services to score political points on her desire to infringe on women's constitutional right to abortion.
Rep. Noem will be in Sioux Falls Tuesday noon at the VFW on South Minnesota. If you get the chance, you might want to ask her why she wants to do more harm than good for women.
So, it brings up the question as to whether "anti-abortion" leaders and politicians support policies that are counterproductive in order to maintain a certain level of unwanted pregnancies. Fewer contraceptive services results in more pregnant women funneled into these faith-based crisis pregnancy centers, which are increasingly supported by tax dollars. More pregnant women generates more funds for them. It's really a racket with these faith-based crisis pregnancies centers supporting legislation that will increase pregnant women coming through their doors. Then they pay off the politicians with the tax dollars they receive for the politicians supporting policies that increase unwanted pregnancies.
I get the impression Noem is concerned about her next reelection. She has been out and about this term where the last term she didn't want anything to do with voters.
Who does she fear?
Reagan, Bush and religious loonies managed to kill funding for birth control in third-world nations and Mexico. The world is no reaping the harvest of that idiocy. Noem wants more of it.
"Reagan, Bush and religious loonies managed to kill funding for birth control in third-world nations and Mexico."
So Doug, are you into eugenics:
LEADING MEMBERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL EUGENICS SOCIETY
• Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood;
• Sir John Cockburn, President of the International Masons;
• Sir Charles Darwin and Leonard Darwin, the grandson and son of evolutionist Charles Darwin;
• Mrs. Vera Houghton, First General Secretary of International Planned Parenthood Federation and Chief Executive of the Abortion Law Reform Association; married to Lord Houghton, head of the British Labour Party in the 1970s;
• Julian S. Huxley, Secretary General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO);
• Lord John Maynard Keynes, famous economist, editor of The Economic Journal for 34 years, and governor of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (his wife, Lady Keynes, was also a member of the Eugenics Society);
• Marie Stopes, American birth control pioneer and founder of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.
Reference: Katherine S. O'Keefe. "Crypto-Eugenics: The Hidden Agenda of Planned Parenthood."
Sanger traveled all over the world in pursuit of the promotion of eugenics, birth control, and population control. On one occasion, she even met with Mahatma Gandhi in an attempt to get him to endorse birth control for the purpose of controlling his country's population. His words to Sanger was typically gentle, but in reality represented a stinging rebuke to her anti-life cause;
"In the light of what I have said above, birth control by contraceptives and the like is a profound error."
Sanger was without question a racist of the first rank, and it is incomprehensible to most pro-life activists that she continues to be honored in this country. School films routinely portray her as a 'pioneer for women's rights.' And the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in honor of her 100th birthday in 1979.
Human beings were nothing more than farm animals to Margaret Sanger, and this view is reflected in the terms she applied to those that did not measure up to her high standards of perfection. For example, she habitually referred to blacks and Jews as "bad stock." Her label for her dreamed-of Master Race was a "race of thoroughbreds," as described in the November 1921 Birth Control Review.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/prolenc/encyc068.htm
Sibby: South Dakota women who can afford it and wish to terminate their pregnancies merely fly to Omaha, Mpls. or Denver while poor women are forced to be shamed by their state since they can't afford to go elsewhere then many of the resultant children become Medicaid clients.
Why?
Curious whether these bills are really about unintended consequences.
Get off it, Steve. This bill is about whether or not we fund organizations that provide useful health care services to low-income women, services that happen to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions.
Coiry, if we want to reduce unplanned pregnancies and abortions then we should defund Planned Parenthood and ban sex education and instead support marriage between a man and a woman.
Defund Planned Parenthood at women's peril: "The state's health commission says Texas will see nearly 24,000 unplanned births between 2014 and 2015 thanks to these cuts, raising state and federal taxpayer's Medicaid costs by up to $273 million."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/what-happens-when-you-defund-planned-parenthood