The Bush campaign included a statement made by Rhonda Meadows, who was the secretary of Health Care Administration of Florida during his governorship. The episode, along with Bush’s persistently weak favorability ratings, could give opponents an opening to undermine his image as the field’s most electable alternative to Donald Trump.
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Hillary Clinton has been sharpening her attacks on Bush with issues that matter to a lot of swing state voters. I have the benefit of having been governor, and we did defund Planned Parenthood when I was governor. “For that she ought to be ashamed”, tweeted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The bill the Senate voted on this week appears to try to cut Planned Parenthood off from both, even though current federal law says the government can’t discriminate among qualified Medicaid providers.
Bush said that no government, on any level, should fund Planned Parenthood, but it’s okay to publicly fund other types of health clinics.
However, Jeb Bush along with his campaign managers cleaned the remarks only a few hours later.
“You could take dollar for dollar – although I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues – but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations, community health organizations, that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations, to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues”, Bush said. “They provide critical services to all, but particularly low-income women who don’t have the access they need”.
A spokeswoman followed up 25 minutes later saying she had mistakenly sent a draft, and offered an updated version, this one including the admission from Bush that he “misspoke”. Whether Congress ought to be picking and choosing the health care providers women can use based on politics is at the heart of this issue.
By saying they want to defund the women’s health organization, Republicans are setting up a false dichotomy between Planned Parenthood and community health centers.
The story has served social conservatives well because it’s turned the debate around Planned Parenthood’s funding away from generic conversations around the organization’s health services and toward the unsettling details of abortion procedures, as well as a set of specific allegations against the group.
It wasn’t just Democrats who blasted Bush for his on-stage remark. “But abortion should not be funded by the government, any government in my mind”.
The question of Planned Parenthood’s funding leapt into the 2016 presidential contest this week amid an ongoing row into the release of graphic videos, secretly recorded by anti-abortion activists, that show officials of the group describing how they sometimes provide fetal tissue to medical researchers.
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Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention who interviewed Bush on stage Tuesday, said he contacted Bush’s campaign immediately after seeing the reports.
