Senate GOP leadership is moving toward a vote on a bill that would cease federal funding to Planned Parenthood due to concerns about the reproductive health provider raised by heavily-edited videos recently posted online by an anti-abortion group.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) placed the bill, sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), on the Senate calendar as anti-abortion lawmakers had been accusing leadership of blocking a vote on the issue. No date yet has been scheduled for a vote.
The two videos, apparently filmed undercover by a group calling itself the Center for Medical Progress, purport to show Planned Parenthood officials casually haggling over the price of specimens from aborted fetuses with actors posing as buyers for tissue researchers. In the videos, the officials also graphically describe the process by which tissues are procured in abortion procedures.
Planned Parenthood has said the edited videos misrepresent its operations, and affiliates act legally and ethically in their participation in tissue donation programs by only charging researchers for costs incurred in providing the specimens.
Nevertheless, the videos have prompted an uproar among abortion foes, who, among other things, are calling for federal funding to the organizationto be cut off. (Currently, federal funding to Planned Parenthood is only approved for non-abortive services.) Two house committees have launched investigations into the matter, and lawmakers have also called on the Department of Health and Human Services to get involved.
When asked earlier this week whether the House of Representatives would take up a defunding measure, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was noncommittal, telling reporters that lawmakers would wait for more details to emerge from the investigation before deciding their next move.
Wouldn’t it be more productive to vote on legislation that would ban or further regulate tissue donation and/or medical research?
Wait, that’s not the point here? Never mind… please proceed.
We need some “undercover” group to film several Catholic Priests talking about how many boys they have buggered.
Then we can scream and rend our clothing and demand the Catholic Church lose it’s tax-exempt status.
Or how about listening to the tape of Scotty “Smirking” Walker talking on the phone to a journalist he thought was one of the Koch brothers, telling how he will get their agenda passed, yes sir, I will sir, thank you sir, you can count on me sir.
assholes.
It’s Acorn all over again (and that was the plan all along.)
No, that would ruin many republican doctor’s businesses. Republicans don’t want to admit that fetal cell tissue research actually saves republican lives too.
is it just me or does the rhetoric being thrown around sound like the same crap that was being tossed around about ACORN?
I understand that, in an effort to woo women voters, Rethuglicans are dispensing with campaign buttons and handing out wire hangars.