By PHILIP WEGMANN • 3/6/17
President Trump wanted to make a deal. If Planned Parenthood would just stop performing abortions, the Republican president would back off and let them keep their federal funding. At first glance, that seems too good to be true.
The organization hauls in almost half a billion taxpayer dollars each year. And if abortion really makes up only 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood provides, then focusing on the other 97 percent of the business model shouldn’t be too hard.
But that will never happen. The women’s group won’t take the deal and by publicly squawking at the Trump proposal, they just negotiated themselves out of the conversation in the coming debate over Obamacare repeal.
The executive vice president for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America wasted little time turning her nose up at the offer Monday. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept,” Dawn Laguens recently told the New York Times. Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”
More than likely, though, the Trump deal would just be bad for business. Regardless of what Planned Parenthood’s President Cecile Richard tells members of Congress, the group is an abortion corporation. And by definition, they exist to turn a profit by performing abortions. That’s not a wild claim cooked up in some alt-right chat room. It’s the logical conclusion of the group’s own accounting.
According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, almost a million abortions occur in America each year. Planned Parenthood ended 323,999 of those pregnancies in FY2015 to corner around 34 percent of the domestic market. And when the anti-abortion group Live Action crunched their publicly available numbers, they found that one-in-eight women who enter a clinic exit after an abortion.
That’s the real reason why Planned Parenthood turned down half-a-billion dollars.
Most women don’t go to Planned Parenthood for pap tests or physical breast exams. They definitely aren’t walking through the organization’s doors to receive mammograms, which they do not and have never provided. Instead, women in a crisis turn to Planned Parenthood to end a pregnancy. And like a butcher that doesn’t sell steak or a fast food restaurant that doesn’t sell burgers, Planned Parenthood couldn’t stay in business without offering abortion.
Of course, the whole back-and-forth was just an exchange of modest proposals. The Trump administration was only calling Planned Parenthood’s bluff and the abortion giant knows it. The current repeal plan, unveiled just moments ago and dubbed the American Health Care Act, would label Planned Parenthood and any other abortion provider a “prohibited entity.”
If passed, the plan would cut every red cent of federal funding to Planned Parenthood. And now there’s nothing Cecil Richards or any other abortion executive can do about it. By refusing to give up abortion, they allowed themselves to be out-negotiated by the Trump administration.
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Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.