Planned Parenthood will still be receiving over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds, thanks to congressional Republicans.
The House voted 240-186 to approve the joint funding and budget bill passed by the Senate that focused primarily on military spending and immigration.
“Congress is slitting the throats of innocent babies—and their own—by funding the abortion giant Planned Parenthood,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue, in a statement sent to Breitbart News. “Soon we will be hearing the siren call of ‘Defund Planned Parenthood’ as an election year rallying cry from the same Republicans who continually sign off on Planned Parenthood’s funding. But the best way to defund Planned Parenthood, is to never have funded them to begin with.”
In its latest annual report, Planned Parenthood shows it took in nearly $544 million in taxpayer funding, as it also boosted its profits by $21 million—or 27 percent—from the prior year. The organization continues to perform over 320,000 abortions per year.
Despite calling itself a “women’s healthcare” group, many of the organization’s non-abortion services are in decline.
Planned Parenthood’s birth control services continued to drop in the past year to 2,701,866—almost four percent—since its 2015-2016 report when it clocked 2,808,815 contraception services. This number was down from 2,945,059 in 2014-2015.
The group has also touted its prenatal and maternity care, though the past year’s annual report shows the number of prenatal services once again dropping—this year to 7,762—a 17 percent decline from the 9,419 performed the year before. In 2014-2015, Planned Parenthood claimed 17,419 prenatal services performed.
“With the funding of Planned Parenthood in the new Senate budget, the Republican Party cannot publicly call themselves ‘Pro-life,’” said Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director, Christian Defense Coalition, in a statement sent to Breitbart News. “I mean really, can ANYONE consider themselves pro-life if they vote to give $530,000,000 to the largest abortion provider in the world that does over 321,000 abortions in America alone.”
In 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan took to YouTube to announce, “We are the pro-life generation and we have to stand up for these values.”
Judie Brown of American Life League said in a statement sent to supporters, “We’ve been lied to, again. The Republican Congress, backed by President Trump, just passed a massive budget bill that includes over half a billion dollars in tax payer money for Planned Parenthood.”
“You read that right,” she continued. “The majority of the Republicans in the House and Senate, as well as the President, campaigned and continually promise to defund Planned Parenthood.”
Tom McClusky of March for Life Action said, according to the Washington Free Beacon, that the spending deal and the process of continuing resolutions point to a “broken process.”
“Because of this decades-long broken process millions of dollars will now continue to flow to abortion giant Planned Parenthood,” he said. “Congress is broken and abortionists profit from it.”
“Really, there’s no excuse for this,” said American Principles Project Executive Director Terry Schilling. “Republicans control Congress. We have a Republican president.”
“The GOP can make all the procedural arguments they want, although they passed on an opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood as a stand-alone reconciliation measure last year,” he added. “The reality is that the Democrats would never let ridiculous Senate rules get in the way of passing their agenda.”