The 22-year-old singer-songwriter Ashley Frangipane, also known as “Halsey,” vowed to donate $1 to Planned Parenthood for every retweet of her message promoting the Women’s March. She reached her goal, subsequently donating $100,000 to the abortion leviathan, the Independent reports.
in the next 5 hours each RT = $1 donation by me to @PPact. Please read & share on why PP is important for all women. @CecileRichards pic.twitter.com/PEfwIecZ1N — h (@halsey) January 21, 2017
in the next 5 hours each RT = $1 donation by me to @PPact. Please read & share on why PP is important for all women. @CecileRichards pic.twitter.com/PEfwIecZ1N
— h (@halsey) January 21, 2017
Halsey participated in the Women’s March this past weekend, and said she personally used Planned Parenthood’s services while experiencing a miscarriage and endometriosis, the Independent continues. She described it as, “a clean, caring facility that treated me with compassion.”
Despite Planned Parenthood’s mainstream perception as a healthcare provider, the reality differs.
“Planned Parenthood’s own numbers show that it performs less than two percent of U.S. women’s cancer screenings, zero mammograms, and offers virtually no prenatal care for women who want to keep their babies,” Live Action News reported upon their own investigation into Planned Parenthood’s services.
“Its solution for helping women to adopt instead of abort is to tell them to search for adoption services on the Internet. Yet, Planned Parenthood has the largest market share of any abortion chain in the country at over 30 percent.”
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Republicans in Congress plan to remove Planned Parenthood’s federal funding in legislation that simultaneously overturns the Affordable Care Act, Time reports. Specifically, Planned Parenthood received $553 million from the federal government in 2014, which comprised more than 40% of the organization’s $1.3 billion in revenue, Time continues.
Earlier this week, the House took the first step in the slow process of defunding Planned Parenthood by passing House Bill 7, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2017, Breitbart reports. This legislation would permanently disallow taxpayer dollars from being funneled into the abortion industry.
The new law would also prevent federal funding from being used for Affordable Care Act tax credits and health plans that include abortion coverage, Breitbart continues. The law also would require the public to be informed if abortion coverage is included in a specific Affordable Care Act health plan so that women can make educated decisions on their healthcare plans.
“This is a great first step in getting the federal government out of the abortion business,” Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, told Breitbart.
“The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act will finally put an end to the direct funding of abortion in all federal departments, agencies, and programs,” he added. “The next step will be to end government payments to the nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood.”
Defunding Planned Parenthood would not result in a void of healthcare services for women, but redirect funding to other community healthcare centers where women can seek the prenatal screenings, cancer diagnostics, and other healthcare services they need.
“If Planned Parenthood were defunded, the $528 million in taxpayer dollars they receive — more than half a billion dollars – would be re-allocated to FQHCs [federally qualified health centers] – facilities that can actually care for all of the needs of women,” Abby Johnson wrote in a blog posted on the Hill. “Women are better off going to other facilities like FQHCs in the first place.”
Johnson continued: “… not a single Planned Parenthood facility provides mammograms, and Planned Parenthood employees say that they do not provide prenatal care. If a woman goes to Planned Parenthood for birth control and discovers in the course of her visit that she has high blood pressure, Planned Parenthood can’t help her, she has to be referred to a FQHC for treatment.”
Yet the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood are not endorsed by everyone.
“Regardless of what Paul Ryan says and what he does, we are not going away, and we are not going anywhere,” Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards told Time. “You can’t completely end a public health care system in America and not think about what the impact will be on the folks who have least access to care.”
Live Action News summarizes Planned Parenthood’s business model well: “While Planned Parenthood publicly touts services like prenatal care for pregnant women to justify its half a billion dollars in taxpayer funding, Live Action investigators contacted 97 separate facilities to ask about prenatal care and found it was virtually nonexistent.
“Instead, female investigators were told Planned Parenthood could only offer them abortions, and it became clear that Planned Parenthood doesn’t help women who want to keep their babies.”
