Senators James Lankford (R-OK), Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Rand Paul (R-KY) today introduced a new bill to defund Planned Parenthood and redirect its taxpayer funding to other entities that provide women’s health care services, including community health centers. Lankford, Ernst, and Paul led a working group for this bill (S.1881), which has support from Oklahoma’s senior Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and the majority of the Republican Conference. Today, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the bill would receive a vote in the Senate next week.
The Senators made the announcement at a press conference today at the Capitol, in which Lankford was joined by Majority Leader McConnell, and Senators Joni Ernst (R-IA), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Tim Scott (R-SC), Rand Paul (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), and Johnny Isakson (R-GA). Lankford made the following remarks during the press conference:
“The difficult thing about this issue is, it’s incredibly difficult to talk about. It’s incredibly difficult to process. Anyone who has seen the images, your first response is incredible compassion for the people that are in this journey.
There are moms that came to a Planned Parenthood and were told that they were just having a medical operation…and were asked to consent, and now they are seeing the other side of that consent. They’re seeing what happened behind the curtain, basically.
When the child that was taken out of them was dismembered and sold for parts and it’s incredibly difficult, I’m sure for them, as it is for the entire nation. So we have incredible compassion for them for what’s going on.
I feel it’s incredibly important that we raise the issue, and that we address this immediately, and that we continue to provide funding for women’s health, but we don’t continue to provide funding for an organization that makes part of their money off the death of that child, and then part of the money off the sale of the parts of that child to different research facilities.
To watch the video, and to see literally the haggling over the price of body parts as if it was a t-shirt at a garage sale, haggling, is really difficult for any of us to understand just the basic humanity of that. So this is an appropriate step to continue to protect women’s health and we’re looking forward to getting the chance to take this on and continue to deal with this issue in the days ahead.”
Since the Planned Parenthood videos were released online, many different pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress to defund, investigate, or restrict Planned Parenthood. Specifically, this new bill would prohibit federal funding of Planned Parenthood Federation of America or any of its affiliate organizations; protect federal funding for health services for women, including diagnostic laboratory and radiology services, well-child care, prenatal and postnatal care, immunizations, cervical and breast cancer screenings and more; and ensure there is no reduction in overall federal funding available to support women’s health.
On July 16, Lankford became the first Senator to deliver a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate about the recent videos revealing Planned Parenthood’s practice of harvesting human body parts from abortions.
