A committee in the Indiana state House voted today to remove state taxpayer funding from the Planned Parenthood abortion business through the state’s family planning program.
The House Public Policy Committee voted 7-3 Thursday to send HB 1205, a bill that removes state contracts and grants from abortion businesses to the full state House.
Republican Rep. Matt Ubelhor of Bloomfield is the main sponsor of the legislation and he said he brought the bill forward because it is inappropriate for money meant for family planning efforts to go to the Planned Parenthood abortion business, which receives $1.6 million annually from the state.
During the committee debate, Republican Rep. Sean Eberhart of Shelbyville said he opposes abortions but voted against the bill, according to an AP report.
Meanwhile, pro-abortion Rep. Vanessa Summers, a Democrat from Indiana, walked out on the committee hearing complaining that the votes were meant to hurt women.
“What’s happening is they’re making women second class citizens, trying to roll back to the time when women didn’t have rights and I couldn’t listen anymore,” Summers said about her outburst.
Meanwhile, the panel also approved HB 1210, a bill with informed consent requirements that originally allowed women considering an abortion to know that their unborn child will feel significant pain during the procedure.
But Rep. Mark Messmer, a Republican, won an 8-5 vote to add more regulations — making it so women would be given information before the abortion on the research showing its link to breast cancer, and another showing women how they can get child support payments from a partner who may want them to get an abortion, and language making it so an abortion can’t be done after 20 weeks of pregnancy except to save the life of the mother.
Passage of the de-funding measure comes at the same time as Congress is considering an amendment to remove Planned Parenthood and its affiliates as a recipient of any federal taxpayer dollars under any governmental department or program. The House of Representatives is expected to vote today on whether to approve the amendment sponsored by Indiana Rep. Mike Pence.
Both the Indiana bill covering state taxpayer funds and the Pence amendment covering federal funds follows on the heels of new videos showing Planned Parenthood center staff in four different locations helping undercover investigators posing as sexual traffickers. The Planned Parenthood staff show no concerns and help them arrange abortions for the victimized girls as well as STD testing.
The sting operations revealed Planned Parenthood center staffers were willing to provide assistance to alleged operators of a sex trafficking ring — ranging from helping them arrange abortions for the underage girls they said they were victimizing to showing them how to avoid scrutiny and skirt parental involvement laws. The videos covered Planned Parenthood centers in Richmond and also other centers in Roanoke, Charlottesville, and Falls Church. A District of Columbia Planned Parenthood also encouraged and assisted sexual traffickers, as evidenced in an undercover audio file.
Live Action also filmed Planned Parenthood staff helping sex traffickers in New Jersey — and the nurse who aided the alleged traffickers there has already been fired while the state health department is looking into the problems further.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has already received the full, unedited footage of the Planned Parenthood expose’ videos and he told CBS 6 WVTR in Richmond that they are “shocking.”
Live Action has previously released more than a dozen hidden camera videos from ten states. This body of visual evidence shows several alarming patterns of illegal Planned Parenthood activities including cover-up of sexual abuse of minors, the skirting of parental consent laws, citing unscientific and fabricated medical information to manipulate women to have abortions, and Planned Parenthood’s willingness to accept donations earmarked to abort African-American babies.
