Protesters wait to enter Congressman Leonard Lance’s Westfield district office in February, as hundreds rallied there in support of Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act. (Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
BY STAR-LEDGER EDITORIAL BOARD eletters@starledger.com
The Republican plan to end all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, baked into Trumpcare, would result in thousands of unwanted births.
That’s a lesser-noticed but foreboding finding from the same Congressional Budget Office report that shows Trumpcare would cut federal spending on Medicaid by a whopping $880 billion over the next decade.
We all know how this goes. When women lose access to reliable contraception, they have more unplanned births, and the children they can’t support end up needing Medicaid and other government services.
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The same Medicaid that’s being savagely cut. Millions of poor women will be kicked off health insurance under Trumpcare, and the President’s budget also slashes many other programs that help support poor families.
He’s forcing women to have unwanted children, then telling them they’re on their own. But make no mistake: We’ll be paying for this one way or another – in emergency room, welfare, prison and other costs.
The CBO estimated in 2015 that defunding Planned Parenthood would cost the government an additional $130 million over 10 years. It’s a budget debacle, to make a dubious political point.
No federal funding is used for abortion, except for narrow exceptions: to save the life of the woman, or cases of rape or incest. But Republicans argue that even if federal funding is paying for cancer screenings, it frees up other money to pay for abortions.
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To which we say: So what?
This is like refusing to pay taxes because there’s one item in the federal budget that offends you – say, funding for the Iraq war. But Trump sees the political hazard, so he tried to cut a deal. He said he’d maintain federal funding if Planned Parenthood stopped offering abortions or any such referrals.
Keep in mind as you consider this offer: Abortion is a legal right. Sometimes it’s even a life-saving procedure. But because Trump-backers personally oppose it, he attempted to strong-arm Planned Parenthood into refusing the option to all women.
It was a non-starter. Now, Republicans have moved to cut off women’s access to life-saving care and their right to make their own reproductive choices, in a way that goes well beyond Planned Parenthood.
Trumpcare would also cut off abortion access for the privately insured, by prohibiting the use of tax credits to buy a health policy that covers abortion. As a result, insurers will likely stop including that coverage in individual health plans.
Perhaps it’s time to rally again outside the offices of N.J. Republicans, or just give them a ring and ask: Will they defend women’s health and reproductive rights?
Planned Parenthood can’t survive on private donations. Federal dollars account for about half of its funding in New Jersey, largely through Medicaid. Three quarters of its patients in our state have incomes lower than $17,820, the Record reported.
More than half its clinics nationwide are in medically underserved communities. So many women won’t be able to obtain an abortion elsewhere, or life-saving cancer treatments, breast exams and pap smears.
In other words, this was never really a health plan at all. It is a plan to give big tax breaks to those at the top, and impose the personal beliefs of Trump supporters on all women – the same moral compass that helped elect the crotch-grabber.
NJ.Com
