"If Senate Republicans want to end the use of fetal tissue in scientific research, they ought to say so ... rather than seek to cut off women’s access to birth control." But that's not their aim-- they want to stop women from having sex!

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COMMENTS: 
*  The anti choicers never did have facts on their side, so they had to make them up. "Gotcha" videos are not facts. Unintended pregnancies are. And none of the Christ eaters ever want to help pay for any of the children they force women to have.  They're like absent fathers who are there at first, then leave.  But then, anti choicers are only interested in the "child" from conception until birth. Then it could starve to death for all they care.
*  So ol' Boner is now going to wait for facts. Quaint.
*  Hahaha. When these congress nitwits refund [sic] Planned Parenthood they will have absolutely no influence and PP can go in its most profitable direction.
*  Republican policies on reproduction have *never* been about reducing abortions. They have always been about making sure that women face steep consequences for having sex without explicitly intending to get pregnant.  You can't say you're against abortion, then do everything in your power to make sure women don't have access to accurate health information, and affordable, effective contraception. PP has been essential for getting women access to that contraception, thereby reducing the need for abortion. Call a spade a spade. They don't want fewer abortions- they want women to have less sex.
   *  ... YES. This describes the bulk of the anti-choice crowd in general.
        *   Yep, they continue to pander to the evangelicals.
*  It's the weird Calvinist streak in the American identity... it's been here since the Mayflower and it has been trouble for nearly 400 years. It is just a small step from The Scarlet Letter and the stocks to Ernst and her squealing pigs. It is a terrible thing to see that destructive force rise again.
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Senate Republicans accidentally promote abortion
By Dana Milbank, July 31, 2015

Senate Republicans this week, teeming with righteous indignation, introduced S. 1881, “a bill to prohibit federal funding of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”

Here’s a better name for it: the Abortion Promotion Act of 2015.

No doubt the authors of the legislation think that anything that hurts Planned Parenthood, the leading provider of abortions, would further the pro-life cause. But their proposal — defunding all Planned Parenthood operations in retribution for secret videos showing the group’s officials discussing the sale of fetal organs — would do far greater harm to fetuses than anything discussed in the videos.

There already is a ban on federal funding of abortion, with rare exceptions, at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else. The federal funds Senate Republicans propose taking away from Planned Parenthood are used largely to provide women with birth control. And because there simply isn’t a network of health-care providers capable of taking over this job if Planned Parenthood were denied funding, this means hundreds of thousands of women, if not millions, would over time lose access to birth control.

Take away women’s contraceptives, and a greater number of unintended pregnancies — and abortions — would inevitably result.

Consider: Of the 4.6 million people who receive care annually under Title X, the federal family-planning grant program, 1.7 million of them go to Planned Parenthood — and two-thirds of women leave with some form of contraception. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and other sponsors of the Senate legislation claim that other providers in the family-planning network will pick up the slack. But Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, says that’s nonsense.

“It shows an astonishing lack of understanding about how these networks are put together,” said Coleman, whose membership includes not just Planned Parenthood but also hospitals, state governments, local health departments and others — most of which don’t provide abortions. “This is not a network that’s ready to roll,” she said. Even with Planned Parenthood still in the equation, “they are worried about their capacity to do what they’re doing.”

Coleman’s forecast if the Senate bill were to become law: “We would see rates for unintended pregnancies and the need for abortions to rise. There are very real implications to the public health.”

Planned Parenthood has itself to blame for the current crisis: Even if fetal organ sales are legal and rare, and even if the videos were highly edited by ideological foes trying to entrap Planned Parenthood by using phony identities, officials at the organization should have known they were a fat target for such things. There’s no excuse for callous talk about how the group is “very good” at performing abortions so that fetal hearts, lungs and livers can be kept intact and sold. (Planned Parenthood didn’t respond to a request for information I made this .)

But antiabortion forces, in their zeal to slay their bête noire, are actually attempting something sure to increase the number of abortions: Denying women access to birth control. In June, I wrote about the paradox of antiabortion organizations’ antipathy toward expanding the availability of long-acting birth control — a policy that would do more than anything else (including severe abortion restrictions) to reduce abortion. The same perverse logic is in play here.

The Ernst legislation says that “all funds no longer available to Planned Parenthood will continue to be made available to other eligible entities.” But because Title X money is given as grants, this would be impossible to transfer to other providers in the short term, even if they were able to take on the load. And congressional Republicans’ assurances are suspect, Coleman notes, because they’ve already cut Title X funds by 13 percent, or $40 million, since 2010 — resulting in a loss of 667,000 family-planning patients annually. House Republicans this spring proposed eliminating funding entirely for the Nixon-era Title X program.

If Republicans are genuinely outraged about the Planned Parenthood videos, perhaps they should revisit the federal law that makes legal such harvesting of fetal tissue for research. Those standards were enacted in 1993, with the support of, among others, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), now the majority leader and a co-sponsor of Ernst’s bill. If Senate Republicans want to end the use of fetal tissue in scientific research, they ought to say so — and endure an outcry from the medical community — rather than seek to cut off women’s access to birth control.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has a sensible alternative to the Senate Republicans’ approach. “There’s an investigation underway and I expect that there will be hearings,” he said. “And as that process develops, we’ll make decisions based on the facts. But let’s get the facts first.”

Facts first: What a novel — and refreshing — notion.
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