JD Vance wants to defund Planned Parenthood over non-existent ‘late-term abortions’
J. D. Vance recently confirmed the Trump administration’s desire to defund Planned Parenthood over allegations of the organization’s “late-term abortions,” even though such a phenomenon doesn’t exist.
Planned Parenthood is a nonprofit organization that provides healthcare services and sexual education across the United States. The organization provides many vital services to women. It claims that 97% of its care is prevenentive health services, such as cancer screenings, exams, birth control, and STD treatment. However, because one of its many healthcare services is abortion, Planned Parenthood has faced frequent attacks from conservatives. The organization has been federally funded since 1970 when Richard Nixon signed Title X into law to ensure that low-income and uninsured individuals still have access to vital health care and family planning services. Taking away Planned Parenthood’s federal funding would strip millions of women of their access to basic healthcare services, but this is exactly what Vance and Donald Trump want to do.
Meanwhile, Vance’s entire stance on the defunding of Planned Parenthood is based on misinformation.
J. D. Vance confirms the Trump administration will try to defund Planned Parenthood
While speaking to RealClearPolitics, Vance openly outlined the Trump administration’s plans to defund Planned Parenthood. He confirmed that, much like the first administration, the current administration supports defunding the organization, and “it will remain a consistent view.” Vance made no mention of the wide variety of healthcare services that Planned Parenthood offers nor how it prioritizes low-income patients. Instead, he focused on the organization’s alleged “late-term abortions.” He stated, “On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean, our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.”
First of all, Vance is using abortion as the sole reason to defund Planned Parenthood. He’s using something that accounts for just 3% of the organization’s services as a reason to defund the entire organization. Second, the federal funds that he wants to strip Planned Parenthood of don’t even fund abortion services. Since 1977, the Hyde Amendment has been in place and forbids any federal funds from being allocated to abortion services. There are some exceptions to the law, though, such as when an abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life. For the most part, taxpayers do not fund any kind of abortion, especially not “late-term abortions,” because those don’t actually exist.
Late-term abortion isn’t a medically accepted term. After all, the medical definition of a late-term pregnancy is between 41 weeks and 41 weeks and six days. However, anti-abortion activists wrongfully use the term to reference abortions at or after 21 weeks. Calling a 21-week-old pregnancy “late-term” isn’t factual. It’s just an attempt to mislead people into thinking that abortions happen up to or even after birth. Meanwhile, even if Vance was referencing abortions after 21 weeks in his statement, those make up just 1% of all abortions. Ultimately, though, since “late-term abortion” isn’t a medically accepted term, it’s difficult to know what he means. He could be advocating to defund Planned Parenthood based on something entirely non-existent or something that makes up only the smallest percentage of the organization’s services.
Since abortion isn’t federally funded anyway, the only thing the Trump administration will be doing in defunding Planned Parenthood is hurting the women and communities that rely on Planned Parenthood’s health care services the most. Over two-thirds of the organization’s patients are low-income individuals, while 60% rely on Medicaid and Title X to access its services. Defunding Planned Parenthood threatens to take away the only healthcare services that some communities can access. It’s strange that Vance has claimed he wants to win back America’s trust on the topic of abortion but advocates ripping away healthcare access from millions of women because he’s worried about non-existent late-term abortions that taxpayers have never funded.
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