Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who is pro-life, today criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump after he appeared to waffle on de-funding Planned Parenthood in two interviews on Tuesday.
Donald Trump continues to talk about the Planned Parenthood abortion business and, in a new interview late Tuesday, he said Planned Parenthood should possibly be de-funded if it doesn’t stop doing abortions. That seems almost a guarantee since abortion is the central component of Planned parenthood’s business — though the Republican candidate didn’t appear to know that.
Some pro-life advocates have interpreted comments from Trump as essentially allowing Planned Parenthood to continue receiving $550 million in taxpayer funding since it doesn’t separate its abortion business from everything else it does.
Fiorina, who herself said she supports a government shutdown if Planned Parenthood is not de-funded, took Trump to task over his remarks and said they make him sound like a Democrat. Here’s more:
“Unfortunately, I think Mr. Trump is taking the Democrat Party’s talking points on Planned Parenthood,” Fiorina said in an interview released by CBS News on Wednesday.
“There are many other organizations that exist to help women with their health issues — pap smears, mammograms, et cetera,” added Fiorina, who has climbed in the polls following her widely praised performance at last week’s debate.
“In fact, Planned Parenthood does very few mammograms, just as one example, but what they do is a whole lot of abortions,” she said.
Fiorina made similar marks in a new interview with the Weekly Standard:
“I profoundly disagree with that statement by Donald Trump,” said the former Hewlett-Packard CEO. “They need to be defunded. There are many organizations that provide the kind of services that he mentioned. Planned Parenthood must be defunded.”
Tuesday morning on CNN, Trump said he supported de-funding the abortion aspects of Planned Parenthood but thought funding for non-abortion components ought to remain — which had pro-life advocates concerned he would leave the status quo of $550 million in taxpayer funding in place.
Then last night, Trump appeared on the Sean Hanity show and wrongly claimed that abortion was a small part of the Planned Parenthood abortion business.
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Trump said: “There’s two Planned Parenthoods, in a way. You have it as an abortion clinic. Now that’s actually a fairly small part of what they do, but it’s a brutal part. And I’m totally against that and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service women. And one of the things that I thought was so terrible, when Jeb Bush the other day talked about women’s health issues he was so bad. It’s like what is he doing? We have to help women. A lot of women are helped. So we have to look at the positives also for Planned Parenthood.”
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Them, Hannity corrected Trump and pointed out that Planned Parenthood does 330,000 abortions a year and that funding its non-abortion aspects frees up money to promote and perform abortions. Responding to that, Trump said “maybe” Planned Parenthood should be de-funded.
“Maybe unless they stop with the abortions, we don’t do the funding for the stuff that we want,” Trump said.