What’s the best way to get your message to President Trump? Two groups on opposite sides of the abortion debate seem to agree: Target the TV shows he likes to watch and tweet about like Morning Joe and Fox & Friends.
Around the time of the inauguration, Planned Parenthood ran a somewhat odd TV ad on Morning Joe in which a woman who scheduled an abortion at Planned Parenthood expresses gratitude that the abortionist sensed the mother’s reluctance and told her to go home and think it over. The mother decided to let the baby live. (Around the same time, the pro-life group Live Action released a video debunking the myth that Planned Parenthood provides a significant amount of prenatal care.)
Now, the Susan B. Anthony List, a leading pro-life group, is responding with a TV ad of its own debuting Friday on Morning Joe and Fox & Friends:
During the campaign, Trump was reluctant to criticize Planned Parenthood, but he ultimately promised to defund the group so long as it performed abortions. As the SBA List TV ad points out, Planned Parenthood performs more than 300,000 abortions per year, does not perform mammograms, and provides little in the way of prenatal care.
In 2015, Congress passed a bill redirecting most of Planned Parenthood’s funding to community health centers (and repealing much of Obamacare) under budget reconciliation rules that only require a simple majority, rather than the usual 60 votes, to make it through the Senate. But President Trump doesn’t need to wait to redirect a significant amount of Planned Parenthood’s funding to organizations that don’t perform abortions. As Ramesh Ponnuru recently pointed out, Trump’s administration could enact a regulation first implemented by the Reagan administration to keep “family planning” funds from going to organizations that perform or promote abortion.
