When Democrats complain that states are defunding Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion business and a politically active group on behalf of Democrats — they frequently complain that such a move deprives women of needed healthcare services.
This week, Maryland’s legislature has proven that this excuse is just a pretext.
Here’s the story: The Trump administration has recently revived an old Reagan-era rule (never before enforced) that reserves Title X family planning funds for organizations that neither perform nor refer abortions.
Title X has never funded abortion because abortion is not a form of birth control. The logic behind the Trump administration’s rule is that Title X funds can be used to subsidize an abortion operation — a common operating model for Planned Parenthood. Even if some states’ taxpayers must subsidize abortion directly (as in Oregon and California), this reasoning holds that federal taxpayers should not have to subsidize abortion either directly or indirectly with funds that are in fact intended for family planning.
Trump’s rule, while controversial, does not cut funding for family planning, nor does it deprive women of needed health services. That’s because there are literally thousands of community health centers that receive such funds and provide services and have nothing to do with abortion. More than 6,000 locations are operated just by Federally Qualified Health Centers, which provide a much wider variety of women’s health services than any abortionist.
Unfortunately, Maryland’s Democrat-controlled House and Senate have now passed into law a measure that would actually reject federal funds for all women’s clinics if the Trump administration’s rule is allowed to go into effect. These legislators are cutting off real-life women’s noses to spite their own faces. The reality is that most women who seek subsidized care or contraception under Title X are not seeking abortions at all.
Maryland Democrats would evidently prefer to deprive all other women’s health centers of federal money. It is enough to make any reasonable person question their motives. Although Maryland is a very liberal state, there is no evidence that its taxpayers are so interested in subsidizing abortion as a form of birth control that they would simply send back federal money as a matter of principle.
We live in an era when the abortion issue is coming to a head. There is talk that abortion could finally be dealt with through democracy for the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided. The dubious constitutional right to unrestricted abortion is teetering, even though the realpolitik of various states suggests that the abortionist’s knife will not be sheathed any time soon.
That debate must be allowed to play itself out in states as varied as New York, Rhode Island, Missouri, and Alabama.
But as that happens, this is not a time to hold all women’s well-being hostage to one single subspecialty of obstetrics that many Americans don’t even consider to be a form of healthcare.
