Can Republicans keep the government open—and taxpayer wallets to Planned Parenthood shut? That’s the question on everyone’s minds as the GOP catapults into another last-minute budget frenzy. With the hot seat barely cold after yesterday’s Cecile Richards hearing, Republicans are moving quickly into phase two of defunding the abortion giant.
Earlier this week, Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) zeroed in on the horrors uncovered by the Center for Medical Progress videos with pointed questions about a particularly sickening case on the tape. “Ms. Richards,” he asked, “if a child survives an abortion attempt, should it be given nourishment and medical care?” (Of course, we already know where President Obama stands.) “I’ve never heard of such a circumstance happening,” she replied, despite grown abortion survivors testifying to that very fact two weeks earlier. “After 18 hours of being burned in my mother’s womb,” Gianna Jessen told Congress this month, “I was delivered alive in an abortion clinic in Los Angeles.”
Her story, a gripping and powerful witness to the lives that are very much on the line in this debate, went viral. “Thankfully, the abortionist was not at work yet,” Jessen went on. “If he had been there, he would have ended my life with strangulation, suffocation, or leaving me there to die. Instead a nurse called an ambulance, and I was rushed to the hospital.” Years later, despite incredible hardships and difficulty, she says the side effect of cerebral palsy is actually “a tremendous gift to me.”
Not every born-alive child is so lucky. As one technician described with bone-chilling detail, plenty of unwilling baby organ donors feel the excruciating pain of their death and dismemberment. “There was one specific video,” Rep. DeSantis reminded Richards, “…describing harvesting the brain of a late-term boy. She said she wasn’t sure if the baby was alive since its heart was still beating and she harvested its brain by cutting his head open starting with the chin. Do you recall that?” She said she didn’t. “There is nothing she has ever described,” Richards claimed, “that I could attest to has ever happened.” As several of Daleiden’s videos show, the practice is far more widespread than Planned Parenthood, its President, or our President, will ever admit.
In a parallel track to ending this forced partnership with Planned Parenthood, the GOP is trying to defund Planned Parenthood the same way liberals forced ObamaCare on America. “You’re not going to stop [Planned Parenthood] if you don’t get this to the President’s desk,” said Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.). “Reconciliation seems to be the clearest path to do that.” Under reconciliation, a budget process that Democrats used when they controlled Congress, the majority party can fast-track a funding bill through the Senate—without filibusters—and pass it with 51 votes instead of the 60 normally required to end debate. In this case, it would almost guarantee that a bill redirecting Medicaid money away from Planned Parenthood to non-abortion community health centers would land on the White House’s desk. From there, the burden would be on the President to decide if America should continue to fund an organization that is trafficking in baby body parts.
Contact your congressman and senators and urge them to support the reconciliation process—and take a bite out of Planned Parenthood’s budget!
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