How does it go? Oh, yes, the best defense is a good offense. Courtesy of a courageous and relentless pro-life House leadership team, some of Planned Parenthood’s saintly veneer is being worn away. In the long and intense debate over federal funding, the public is gradually coming to appreciate two truths:
First, that PPFA is up to its eyeballs in abortion. The percentage of PPFA’s clients who receive abortions is 12%–nearly one in eight. And (assuming the standard rate for first-trimester abortions), the 332,278 abortions Planned Parenthood performed in 2009 would represent $149.9 million–a whopping 37% of the $404.9 million in clinic revenues the nation’s largest abortion provider took in for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009.
Second, pro-abortionists in Congress, started with President Obama, were prepared to see negotiations over legislation to fund the federal government for the rest of the current fiscal year to collapse, forcing an interruption in many federal programs and services, in order to protect Planned Parenthood.
I mention that by way of preface to a very brief comment on “Why the Repeal of Hyde [the Hyde Amendment] is a Priority for Pro-Choice Advocates,” written by “Serena” which appeared on the feminists for choice website (https://feministsforchoice.com/why-the-repeal-of-hyde-is-a-priority-for-pro-choice-advocates.htm).
Of course Serena mangles the history of the Hyde Amendment along with just about everything else. “We need to understand what we are fighting for in the pro-choice movement,” she writes. “Abortion is not the issue. The fetus is not the issue. This is a battle about the self-determination of women over the course of their lives.” Put another way it’s all about “access” which requires a limitless supply of federal dollars extracted from an unwilling public.
Serena is of course further unnerved by the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” which passed the House in May. H.R. 3 would codify the principles of the Hyde Amendment on a permanent, government-wide basis, applicable to both longstanding federal health programs and to the new programs created by the PPACA.
It’s very much worth mentioning that NRLC estimates, based on various studies from sources that are not sympathetic to our cause, that at least a million people are alive today who otherwise would have been lost, had it not been for the Hyde Amendment.
In that sense, this discussion IS about “access”—access to life.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in his Natioanl Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
