The GOP periodically gets a bee in its collective bonnet that won’t go away and seems immune to facts. An example: “voter fraud”, which every serious study has found is essentially nonexistent, is a big GOP warcry. (The reason, of course, is to put in place procedures and requires that impact potential Democratic voters—the poor, the elderly, the marginalized—and keep them from voting. In the GOP, a sign of good citizenship is making sure that only voters from your party gets to vote. Seriously. The whole party’s like that now.)
Planned Parenthood—which offers a broad range of women’s health services aimed at empowering women—has long been in the GOP’s cross-hairs: one thing the GOP does NOT like is empowering women. Jillian Rayfield reports for TPMMuckraker:
House Republicans have announced an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s funding, in the latest move in the seemingly endless effort to cripple the women’s health service provider.
Last week, the Oversight subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), sent a letter to Planned Parenthood requesting around twelve years of financial documents as part of an investigation into whether the women’s health organization is misusing its federal funds.
“The committee has questions about the policies in place and actions undertaken by PPFA and its affiliates relating to its use of federal funding and its compliance with federal restrictions on the funding of abortions,” Stearns said in the letter.
Under the Hyde Amendment, federal funds cannot be used for abortions, and the organization submits to yearly audits to that end. But the committee’s requests are still aimed at making sure Planned Parenthood isn’t violating this law, asking for internal audits of how the organization spent its federal funds between 1998-2010, and how “segregation between family planning and abortion services is accomplished.”
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called the investigation “politically motivated” that “is a continuation of the efforts of earlier this year to undermine Planned Parenthood, and more disturbingly, women’s access to the primary and preventive care they need.”
On Wednesday, Henry Waxman (D-CA), ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Diana DeGette (D-CO), ranking member of the Oversight subcommittee, sent a letter to Stearns decrying the investigation and questioning ” whether Planned Parenthood is being singled out as part of a Republican vendetta against an organization that provides family planning and other medical care to low-income women and men.” . . .
And here’s another article on the GOP’s war on women by Sarah Seltzer in Salon (from AlterNet):
Every day, it becomes a little bit harder for women to get the healthcare they need in America, particularly if that healthcare has anything to do with sexual and reproductive health.
The “war on women” began almost the moment that 2011’s new class of legislators took their oaths of office, and it’s still going on as we speak. Anti-choice groups have successfully created blueprint legislation for waiting periods, parental consent laws, mandatory ultrasounds and targeted regulations of clinics. These kinds of laws have been passed in statehouse after statehouse.
With such a steady attrition of rights, it’s hard to keep up the momentum, anger and outrage that we felt this winter and spring. But people should still be outraged, because a number of states are avidly participating in a race to the bottom, determined to outdo each other in restricting access to abortion, chipping away at the fundamental promise of Roe v. Wade, and belittling women and their healthcare providers in the process.
Leading the way are Ohio, Virginia, Kansas and South Dakota. Other states, like Indiana and Missouri, already have so many restrictions of various types in place that they’re going to be hard to catch up with.
Here’s a rundown of what’s happening state by state, and which states are really making it worse for woman.
Ohio: A fetal heartbeat law that would outlaw abortion before most women know they’re pregnant
Ms. Magazine’s Holly L. Derr reports from Ohio on a new law that has dire implications: . . .