Less than a week after attempting to make people believe abortion rights aren’t absolutely on the line should he and Donald Trump win the election, JD Vance accidentally admitted he and his potential boss have plans to gut Planned Parenthood if voters are crazy enough to send them to the White House.
Asked over the weekend if a second Trump administration would defund the health care organization, Vance said, “On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions. That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view.”
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Despite regularly crowing about helping overturn the constitutional right to an abortion, and sending the matter back to the “states”—many of which now have extreme or total abortion bans—Trump has been trying to convince voters that he’s somehow a moderate on reproductive rights. (Last month, he told women that in a second term, “You will be protected and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”) During the vice presidential debate against Tim Walz, Vance seemed to understand this, hence the decision to falsely claim he’s never been in favor of a national abortion ban, which he called for in 2022. But he apparently forgot the plan when questioned about Planned Parenthood on Saturday.
Not surprisingly the Ohio senator’s claims regarding the work the nonprofit does were deeply misleading. As Jenny Lawson, executive director of the organization’s super PAC, noted in a statement on Sunday, “Federal funds cannot be used to provide abortion care at any point in pregnancy.” On the flip side, she noted that the group’s “health centers do use federal funds to provide cancer screenings, birth control, STI testing and treatment, and many other essential reproductive health care services,” and that defunding it “would only deepen and expand the public health crisis we’re already in thanks to Donald Trump, causing more people to suffer and die for lack of basic reproductive care.” (As for late-term abortions in general, less than 1% of all abortions performed in 2021 were done so at or beyond 21 weeks; for his part, Trump regularly lies about Democrats supporting abortions occurring after a baby is born, a claim that is too stupid for words.)
During Trump’s first term in office, his administration introduced a rule that would have cut as much as $60 million in government funding from Planned Parenthood, though the rule was tied up in court and later rescinded by Joe Biden’s administration. (Plenty of damage was done anyway—as The Washington Post notes, “many providers had already shut down in anticipation of the funding cuts, a situation that abortion rights advocates have said hurt reproductive health globally.”)
