Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards: 'We Will Not Go Without a Fight'

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Few groups had as much riding on the outcome of the 2016 election as Planned Parenthood. A Hillary Clinton win would have elevated a fearless defender of family planning and preventive health care to the Oval Office. The Trump presidency, instead, has placed Planned Parenthood in the crosshairs of a Republican-dominated government, crusading against women's reproductive freedom.

Because it serves Medicaid patients, whose care is subsidized by the government, Planned Parenthood receives significant federal funding. Republicans – in a long war, launched by incoming Vice President Mike Pence – have sought to cut off Planned Parenthood's access to federal dollars, in hopes of also crippling its ability to provide abortion services. (These are paid for privately; federal law prohibits virtually all taxpayer funding of abortion.) As a House member in 2007, Pence introduced the first bill seeking to defund Planned Parenthood. As governor of Indiana, he slashed public health funding, shuttering Planned Parenthood clinics and fueling an HIV epidemic in rural Indiana.

Beginning in 2017, the war on Planned Parenthood will be directed from the White House. Donald Trump, in a September letter to anti-abortion activists declared, "I am committed to ... defunding Planned Parenthood." With Pence leading the presidential transition, Trump has tapped as his budget director South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney – the Republican who led the 2015 campaign to shut down the federal government in protest of Planned Parenthood funding. (John Boehner foiled that plot, at the cost of his Speaker's gavel.)

To gauge the severity of the threat, and Planned Parenthood's strategy to defend against it, Rolling Stone recently spoke to Cecile Richards, the group's president for the past decade. In that time, she's seen triumphs, like the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the executive order mandating that insurers cover birth control, as well as bitter defeats, most recently in Texas, which moved in December to cut off state Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. Richards, who's the daughter of famed late Texas Gov. Ann Richards – you can hear just a hint of her mother's twang as she speaks – calls the state "a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/planned-parenthoods-cecile-richards-on-surviving-trump-w458739?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=010317_16

[yeoman6987]

1. Repugs fighting over 833 million dollars that planned parenthood gets from the federal government

That's like a penny to the budget. They are not doing this as a save the budget procedure. They are doing it to screw the poor.

[Guilded Lilly]

2. They are doing it to screw women. Their fear and hate of women having

control over anything is all encompassing.

They hate women.
They fear women.