If tonight’s debate had you double-checking to make sure you hadn’t traveled back in time, chances are you weren’t alone. Every single candidate on stage proved, once again, that they want to turn back the clock for women’s healthcare, and that they remain committed to putting partisan politics between women and their doctors.
Republicans in Congress have voted over and over again to end federal funding to Planned Parenthood — to no avail. But the Republicans on stage tonight are pledged to continue the futile crusade to defund an organization that provides safe and affordable access to basic health care services for millions of women annually.
Here are just a few more of the GOP’s greatest hits on interfering with a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions:
- Donald Trump said he would defund Planned Parenthood, referring to the women’s health organization as “an abortion factory.”
- After the shooting at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Trump talked about the falsified Center for Medical Progress videos. He said, “There is a tremendous group of people that think it’s terrible all of the videos that they’ve seen with some of these people from Planned Parenthood talking about it like you’re selling parts to a car.”
- Ted Cruz supports a personhood amendment that could ban abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, and potentially go so far as to ban common forms of birth control.
- Cruz adamantly opposed the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, claiming it constituted the government “using brute force to force people to pay for abortion-inducing drugs of others.”
- Cruz described the Center for Medical Progress’s misleading Planned Parenthood videos as“[showing] the face of evil” and appearing to “demonstrate an ongoing pattern of criminal conduct.”
- Marco Rubio opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. When asked about exceptions, Rubio said, “I believe and I’ve always advocated that life begins at conception.”
- In 2012, Rubio introduced a bill that would let employers refuse to cover contraceptives in their health insurance plans. In response to the bill, a Tampa Bay Times editorial blasted the senator saying the bill showed Rubio believed “women… should be subject to a religious agenda as a condition of their employment.”
- Jeb Bush accused Planned Parenthood of championing an “effort to harvest and monetize unborn babies… This is not a fetus, this is a child with a beating heart, in the form of a child.”
- Bush also claimed, erroneously, that Planned Parenthood isn’t “actually doing women’s health issues.”
- On another occasion, Bush callously quipped: “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”
- Ben Carson has equated abortion to “human sacrifice” in ancient civilizations, and even suggested that the country needs to “re-educate women,” in order to stop abortions.
- As governor of Ohio, John Kasich signed a bill that banned abortions after 20 weeks including no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. Kasich has “signed and supported some of the most stringent anti-abortion legislation in the country.”
Published: Feb 13, 2016