“They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood”, Clinton said, when asked to defend the cost of her proposal for mandatory paid family leave. However, Green said, Herbert had concern that the national Planned Parenthood organization may be “coloring outside the lines”. For weeks, Planned Parenthood had defended the policy as legal.
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After months of scrutiny and calls from GOP lawmakers to defund Planned Parenthood, the women’s health organization has decided to make a change of policy.
Governor Gary Herbert ordered the state to stop facilitating federal funding from going to Planned Parenthood of Utah after videos surfaced nationally that purported to show Planned Parenthood executives discussing what to do with fetal tissue. However, they were unsuccessful last month in their attempt to eliminate $521 million in federal funding that mostly covers cancer screenings, contraception and other nonabortion activities.
The allegation of law-breaking stems from a series of investigative videos released by CMP starting in July, showing undercover conversations with Planned Parenthood officials, footage taken from inside clinic laboratories, and interviews with the head of a tissue harvesting company StemExpress, which procured tissue from Planned Parenthood clinics.
Planned Parenthood argued the videos were deceptive in their editing and denied seeking any improper payments beyond money legally paid to reimburse costs.
And Rep. Bob Goodlatte, House Judiciary Committee chairman, said his committee will continue investigating whether Planned Parenthood clinics are violating either the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act or the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act when they harvest the fetuses.
But wait, I thought the videos were deceptive. “It was never about money”. However, there has been strong defense of the practice from within the medical and scientific establishment.
James Miller, owner of the suburban St. Louis Pathology Services Inc. that reviews tissue from Planned Parenthood, told lawmakers during the Wednesday hearing that the lab for a time had not been submitting reports on abortions to the state health department as required in Missouri. In the videos, activists can be seen as a biomedical firm’s representatives who are negotiating with Planned Parenthood personnel to buy fetal organs.
“The fees are being used to promote the canard that PP is killing babies for profit”. The other clinic, in Washington state, does not accept money to recover expenses.
University of Notre Dame law professor O. Carter Snead, a bioethicist, had a contrasting view.
The anti-abortion group accused Planned Parenthood of selling baby parts for profit, a contention Planned Parenthood adamantly rejected.
Daleiden said that the change does not provide resolution and warrants continued investigation by Congress.
Chaffetz’s committee has so far reviewed 22,000 pages of documents from Planned Parenthood, the group said, and has not found any wrongdoing. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut.
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“The accusations leveled against Planned Parenthood are categorically false”, Richards said in her letter to Collins.
