This afternoon the House passed the Pence Amendment, introduced by Indiana Republican Mike Pence, to cut off federal funding, including money under Medicaid, to Planned Parenthood. That money is not used for abortions, but for providing women with cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and contraception.
In a statement issued by Planned Parenthood, the group’s president, Cecile Richards, said:
This policy of attempting to undermine Planned Parenthood, the organization in the United States that does more than any other to encourage the use of contraception for those wanting to avoid pregnancy, certainly guarantees an increase in the number of unintended pregnancies. It is difficult to understand why people who say they are opposed to abortion would do so much to undermine the family planning and contraception that helps prevent the need for it.
“To underscore the far reach of Rep. Pence’s proposal,” the statement continued, “it would also cut off 48 percent of Planned Parenthood patients — approximately 1.4 million people — from their source of health care.”
Culture of life.
“Defunding Planned Parenthood” has long been a rallying cry for Pence, as well as for the anti-choice movement. (Although the Pence amendment passed in the Republican-controlled House, it faces a far tougher climb in the Senate.) The anti-choice movement has intensified its efforts of late, though, capitalizing on the vigilante videos produced by Lila Rose and her group Live Action, a propaganda outfit that seeks to falsely depict Planned Parenthood as aiding and abetting child sex trafficking.
I just learned a new fact about Rose. She is a graduate of Summit Ministries, the Colorado Springs organization that teaches teenagers and young adults about the only true worldview, Christianity. I wrote about Summit last year:
[David] Noebel, or “Doc” as his devotees call him, is the doyen of Summit Ministries, the Manitou Springs, Colorado-based institution founded in 1962 to teach evangelical teens about anti-God, anti-Christian threats to the “Christian worldview” and the American way of life. In his seminal textbook, Understanding the Times, Noebel lays out six “worldviews”—Christianity, Islam, secular humanism, Marxism-Leninism, cosmic humanism, and post-modernism—vying for domination in the world. By his own estimate he has educated 30,000 teenagers at his one and two-week conferences at Summit in Colorado and its outposts around the world (including at Oxford) about the evils of atheism, communism, socialism, and other anti-God “statist” worldviews that threaten to destroy America—unless Christians step in to save every soul.
And Planned Parenthood, apparently. Just like ACORN, in the mind of vigilante conservatives like Rose or James O’Keefe, it threatens the fabric of American (Christian) life.
