Sarah Varney:
So this effort to defund Planned Parenthood, which is a phrase you will see across Christian conservative media, has been really going on for decades.
In the first Trump administration, they actually changed the rules to the Title X program that were really, in a sense, specifically targeted towards Planned Parenthood. They said that if you wanted to participate in the title X program, you could not offer abortion services, nor could you refer patients to abortion services.
Of course, federal dollars are not allowed to be used for abortion services, with very limited exceptions for rape and incest and if the pregnant woman’s life is in danger. But, nonetheless, when these rules were put into place by the Trump administration in its first term, in 2019, the entire Planned Parenthood network left Title X, along with many, many other Title X clinics.
When the Biden administration came in, they actually reversed those rules. And, so, many people — many clinics came back in. They reconstituted the Title X clinic. I think it’s clear from these letters that went to Planned Parenthood, everyone from the organization that runs the program in California, in Mississippi, in Maine, that they didn’t want to necessarily take that amount of time that was going to take to do all the rulemaking.
So this was a way to say, we are holding up your funding, we’re going to do an investigation, we expect some remedies. But I think there’s a real sense among these beneficiaries, among these providers that this is just a first step into dismantling the network.
