Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) is introducing legislation this week that would entirely defund Planned Parenthood for at least a year while the federal government investigates the organization in the wake of several covert videos that show top executives from the group aiming to sell body parts from aborted human babies.
Unless Planned Parenthood stops performing abortions at its facilities, Lankford’s bill would pull the taxpayer funding—at least $500 million—for at least one year.
“The recent videos uncovering Planned Parenthood’s inhumane abortion practices have hit a nerve with many Americans,” Lankford said in a statement announcing the bill.
While the government investigates Planned Parenthood to determine if their practice of adapting their abortion procedures to harvest the organs of children violates federal law, they should not continue to receive taxpayer money. Planned Parenthood receives more than $500 million in taxpayer money every year. This is a sensitive topic for many and I am aware our nation is divided on the issue of abortion, but it is common-sense that we shouldn’t force taxpayers to assist the harvesting of human organs.
According to the Washington Post—which cited Planned Parenthood itself—last year alone, Planned Parenthood performed 329,000 abortions. Abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities, and about 10 percent of clients of the organization get abortions.
Last Thursday, in response to the covertly recorded videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing how they would literally sell body parts from aborted babies, Lankford appeared on the U.S. Senate floor and choked up in tears while he discussed the matter.
“This morning in an Appropriations hearing, that the President and I both were in, we had extensive conversation about the rights of orca whales,” Lankford said.
And this protracted conversation went on and on, that many people were also connected to, about the rights of orca whales and the care for them. Then we had a protracted conversation about horse slaughter and how horses would be humanely put down. But in the middle of all that conversation happening today, there were children still being aborted with an instrument reaching into a mother, tearing apart a child but carefully protecting certain organs because those organs would be valuable to sell.
Lankford went on to note that pro-abortion arguments that babies to be aborted in the womb aren’t human babies don’t hold up when the body parts of those babies are sold after the abortion.
“Now, the challenge that we have on this as a nation is, the argument is for that baby,” Lankford said on the Senate floor.
That baby’s really not a baby, it’s just a fetus, it’s tissue. That’s not a human baby is what everyone is told. That’s just tissue and it’s up to the mom to determine what happens to that tissue. And then on the flip side of it moments later they take that tissue and then sell it because it’s human organs that are needed for research. You can’t say in one moment that’s not a human and then sell it for the next moment as a human organ and say now suddenly it is. It was a human all the way through. There was never a time that wasn’t a child, never a time that wasn’t a human, and it seems the ultimate irony to me that we spend time talking about humane treatment of animals being put down like in horse slaughter and we completely miss children being ripped apart in the womb and their body parts being sold.
Lankford went on to question why those in the political class in Washington, D.C., have become so “numb” when it comes to protecting unborn children—people—while fighting so hard to protect animals.
“Why this Congress would spend time today debating horse slaughter and debating orca whales, but yet we’ve become so numb to children that the other debate doesn’t seem to come up,” Lankford said.
Maybe we need to start again as a nation, asking a basic question. If that’s a child, and in our Declaration [of Independence] we said every person that we believe is endowed by our Creator to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, maybe we need to ask as a nation again, do we really believe that?
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