WASHINGTON: US Republican presidential contender Rand Paul said yesterday that he plans to push Congress to cut federal funding for the non-profit reproductive healthcare organisation Planned Parenthood in a debate over its treatment of aborted fetal tissue.
“I think the time is now to discuss whether taxpayer dollars should be going to such a gruesome procedure,” Paul, a Kentucky senator, said on Fox News. “People are outraged by this and I think the American people deserve to have a vote on it.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has started a fast-track process to bring Paul’s legislation for a vote soon, McConnell’s spokesman said yesterday.
Republicans have rallied around secretly recorded videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing ways to perform abortions to preserve fetal tissue for research, as well as the costs involved. The videos were filmed by anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress.
Paul has urged cutting the nearly $500m in annual taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood in the latest Republican effort to limit government support of the group over its abortion services.
A woman’s right to abort a pregnancy has for decades been a highly politicized and hotly debated topic throughout the United States. Republicans now control Congress and, with it, government purse strings.
Republican lawmakers have called on the US Justice Department to investigate whether Planned Parenthood illegally profited from selling fetal tissue, as well as to report how the department enforces abortion regulations and the ban on late-stage abortions. Democrats have called for a federal investigation of how the group obtained the videos.
Planned Parenthood has flatly denied all allegations. Its president, Cecile Richards, on Sunday said that the group “does not at all” profit from fetal tissue donations and that alteration of abortion procedures to better collect tissue is “absolutely not done.”
“Planned Parenthood has broken no laws,” she said on ABC’s This Week, adding that donation of aborted fetal tissue for scientific research is only allowed in a few states, with strict guidelines.
“We should not base any kind of decisions about healthcare in this country based on highly sensationalized folks who are nothing but militant anti-abortion extremists,” she said.
US Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said the Justice Department would review “all the information and determine what steps, if any, to take at the appropriate time”. Reuters
