Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call Photos/Newscom
President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2014 budget released yesterday persists in entangling taxpayer dollars in the abortion industry.
Obama’s budget includes $327 million for Title X family planning programs, a more than $30 million increase over last year’s request. Title X is one of a number of sources of government funding to Planned Parenthood, which performs roughly one out of every four abortions in the United States and was recently accused of tacitly supporting infanticide.
In 2011 alone, Planned Parenthood received over $542 million in total taxpayer funding while performing a record 333,964 abortions. According to analysis by the Susan B. Anthony List, Planned Parenthood has performed almost 1 million abortions in the past three reporting years alone.
Even though the organization boasts the title of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has ridden the waves of taxpayer funding to millions of dollars in annual surpluses. During its last reporting year, like many before it, Planned Parenthood saw a very comfortable income, reporting excess revenues exceeding $87 million and net assets of more than $1.2 billion.
If the organization’s single-minded provision of abortion services isn’t enough to question the continual stream of federal tax dollars, recent disturbing admissions by a local Florida Planned Parenthood affiliate should at least raise scrutiny of the organization’s federal funding.
A few weeks ago, a local Planned Parenthood representative testified against a Florida bill that would require abortion doctors to provide emergency care for infants born after a failed abortion attempt. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion,” asked one Florida legislator during the hearing, “what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”
Instead of expressing the need to provide potentially life-saving medical care to the child, Planned Parenthood official Alisa LaPolt Snow simply responded, “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.”
The Obama Administration also continues to export taxpayer funding of abortion, requesting $37 million for the United Nations Family Population Fund (UNFPA). Despite continued assertions that UNFPA has been involved in China’s coercive one-child policy, the U.S. government persists in sending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to an organization complicit in forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations.
Just this week, Chen Guangcheng, a well-known opponent of forced abortion in China, joined other activists at a congressional hearing testifying on the Chinese government’s gross denial of human rights in enforcing and maintaining its coercive population control agenda.
The Declaration of Independence affirms life among humanity’s “unalienable Rights.” This most basic human freedom should be respected in public policy both on domestic and international fronts.
Domestically, policymakers would do well to end taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood and close the seams in the patchwork of existing domestic federal funding prohibitions by making them permanent. Internationally, Congress can eliminate U.S. contributions to UNFPA as long as the organization persists in working with the Chinese family planning administration. Policymakers should also ensure that international organizations that promote or perform abortions as a method of family planning do not receive certain federal dollars.
