GOP Still Hell-Bent On Defunding Planned Parenthood

Just this week — after a GOP Governor Greg Abbott-launched probe, overseen by a Governor Rick Perry-appointed district attorney — a grand jury dismissed all of the allegations advanced by the Center for Medical Progress’s misleading videos, and even indicted the anti-choice group’s leader, David Daleiden. But that won’t stop the Republicans on stage tonight from continuing to perpetuate insidious and inflammatory lies about an organization essential to ensuring millions of women’s access to a full range of healthcare options.

Republicans will continue to legislate women’s bodies and sacrifice health care access for their own political gain.

• 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.
• Chris Christie supported shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood. He said, “You should put the defunding of Planned Parenthood on the president’s desk. If he’s going to veto it, let the American people see that he stands with the folds who believe that the systematic murder of children in the womb, in a way that preserves the body parts to be sold on the open market, is something that he stands for.”
• As governor of New Jersey, Christie has vetoed funding for Planned Parenthood at least five times.
• 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.”