The Trump Administration delivered a gut punch to family planning healthcare providers across the nation this week, shoving the abortion-rights battle against women into the 2018 voting booth and Aurora’s own 6th Congressional District race.
The administration announced Friday it would resurrect a dangerous and disregarded 1980s-era gag rule against any health care provider taking federal funds, prohibiting health-care providers from the most important detail women need to know if seeking an abortion — where to go.
In what has become typical fashion for the Trump administration, officials offered few details of their plans and a smug, disingenuous tap dance around the truth of their intentions. They are trying to squeeze the life out of Planned Parenthood and end American women’s rights to safe abortion services.
The presidential decree would prohibit any health-care provider that takes federal money, which is essentially all of them, from referring women to abortion services, Trump Administration officials said Friday. It would ban healthcare providers that offer abortion and family planning services in the same facility from receiving federal funds.
“The end result would make it impossible for women to come to Planned Parenthood, who are counting on us every day,” for birth control and cancer-screenings, Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens told the Associated Press. The history of abortion-rights foes in Congress against this important and venerable organization speaks for itself.
Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Friday that the administration is simply recognizing “that abortion is not family planning. This is family planning money.”
She’s deflecting from yet another Trump Administration lie, something Americans have become accustomed to from Conway and the administration she pitches for.
The money she’s referring to is called Title X family planning funds, which critically offers birth-control and cancer screening services to an astounding 4 million poor women each year. Millions of those women depend on Planned Parenthood clinics for those services.
As created decades ago, Title X money has never been allowed for providing abortions. On several occasions, Congress has highlighted that mandate. In fact, health-care providers such as Planned Parenthood must already prove that abortion-services they provide are segregated from any Title X money they receive for family planning and cancer screening services.
This new move by the Trump Administration is unnecessary to achieve its own, nefarious and duplicitous goals. One of the most dangerous aspects of this scam is that it will undermine huge strides made in reducing the rate of America’s teen and unwanted pregnancies. Because of strategic work done by Planned Parenthood and other healthcare providers in Colorado and across the nation, the number of unwanted pregnancies ending in abortion have dropped dramatically over the last several years. That’s according to more than one scientific analysis.
The U.S. Supreme Court and endless case law upholds women’s irrefutable right to medical privacy when seeking abortion. Even recently, the Supreme Court has made clear that mendacious schemes like this latest one, created to undermine reproductive rights by closing women’s health clinics, are nothing but illegal, transparent lies. In 2016, a thunderous 5-3 Supreme Court decision ended a malevolent attempt in Texas to illegally close women’s health clinics. Justices plainly stated that American women have a constitutional right to obtain an abortion, and the government cannot contrive regulations infringing on those rights.
Since the Trump Administration regularly rules by decree, unable to draw legislation from even its own Republican-controlled Congress, this immediately becomes an issue for those seeking a mid-term seat in the House and Senate.
That brings us back to representative such as Republican Mike Coffman, who has historically sided with efforts to restrict abortion rights and defund Planned Parenthood.
Coffman co-sponsored defunding legislation in 2016 based on a scandal over a fraudulent and discredited partisan video scam to make it appear Planned Parenthood sold aborted fetuses as some kind of ghoulish scam.
This administration has made it clear that it is proud to resort to such chicanery to achieve its goals of ending women’s reproductive rights.
Trump’s kick against women’s rights lands squarely against Coffman, who has worked hard to paint himself as a political moderate in an increasingly blue congressional district. This will be a critical test for him and others like him during this fall’s election.
He needs to unequivocally fight against Trump’s abortion-rights ruse, or cede this women’s-rights issue to whoever his Democrat opponent is this fall.
Americans will not tolerate obfuscation on these critical matters. Coffman and all Colorado lawmakers in Congress and the state Capitol must take a clear and honest stand, and defend what’s right.