States Can Take Action When The Federal Government Fails To

Last Friday, The Daily Signal posted an article about states that have defunded Planned Parenthood since the undercover videos showing the sale of aborted baby body parts were released.

The article reports:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is expected to sign a bill defunding Planned Parenthood, making Ohio the ninth state to do so since undercover videos exposed the abortion provider’s apparent role in harvesting the body parts of aborted babies.

The bill, H.B. 294, ensures that state and certain federal funds are not used to perform or promote nontherapeutic abortions at Planned Parenthood or elsewhere. The Ohio House passed the final version 62-32 on Wednesday and sent the legislation to the Republican governor’s desk.

“Governor Kasich has worked with legislative leaders to ensure that public dollars are used to their best purpose,” Kasich spokesman Joe Andrews said, according to The Columbus Dispatch. “The Ohio Department of Health had already stopped awarding state dollars to Planned Parenthood.”

Eight states—Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, and Utah—have defunded Planned Parenthood after the pro-life Center for Medical Progress released a series of hidden-camera videos that put the nation’s largest abortion provider under the microscope for questionable and perhaps illegal practices.

As was previously reported here:

Two CMP (Center for Medical Progress ) investigators, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, were indicted by a grand jury Monday with tampering with governmental records by creating fake driver’s licenses as part of a nearly three-year undercover investigation.

Mr. Daleiden was also indicted on a misdemeanor charge of soliciting human organs. He released a statement Monday defending the investigation and saying that “buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well.”

Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, said it was “not surprising” that the DA’s office would findPlanned Parenthood “blameless while trying to silence those who want to protect every human being’s life.”

“The evidence against Daleiden, as reported by the mainstream media, may or may not be valid, but lest we forget that the prosecution in this case is a district attorney’s office that has a Planned Parenthood board member as a prosecutor,” Ms. Brown said in a Tuesday statement.

Eleven undercover videos released by the CMP beginning in July prompted a dozen states to examine whetherPlanned Parenthood was illegally trafficking in fetal tissue from abortions. Planned Parenthood officials have insisted they were only reimbursed for costs associated with providing fetal tissue to researchers, which is legal.

The indictment of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt was a travesty of justice. I am sure that the fact that the staff of the district attorney’s office includes a board member of Planned Parenthood had a lot to do with the indictment. I suspect that eventually that indictment will be overturned.

The article at The Daily Signal concludes:

Sarah Torre, a policy analyst in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, wrote that Planned Parenthood affiliates receive over half a billion dollars each year from state and federal sources.

“Congress should end federal taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood affiliates and redirect those funds to health centers that provide health care for women without entanglement in abortion or questionable handling of baby body parts,” Torre wrote.

The prosecution of those trying to expose the horrific practices involving the sale of aborted baby body parts is horrible, but that is understandable when you consider the amount of money involved in making abortion an acceptable practice. However, there is a lesson here. The videos have resulted in a number of states defunding Planned Parenthood. The exposure of the practice of selling aborted baby body parts did bring positive results.

Finally, I would like to state that I do not want to make all abortions illegal. There are times when an abortion is a medical necessity. In those cases (which are very rare), that abortion should be done in a hospital under the supervision of a medical doctor. Abortion should not be a for-profit industry bringing in millions of dollars a year–it should be a medical procedure to be used only when absolutely necessary.