Mike Pence and his doublespeak on Title X Family Planning Program
For more than four decades, the federal government has subsidized family planning programs that provide contraceptive and related health and family services to millions of low-income women and men.
The Title X Family Planning program, established in 1970 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by President Nixon, has been largely noncontroversial.
It makes no funds available for abortion, and focuses on what Nixon characterized as the premise that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.”
But funding for Title X, which serves more than 5 million men and women annually, is on House Republicans’ chopping block.
Supporters of defunding have characterized it as an effort to strip funds from Planned Parenthood and other organizations that use other funds to provide legal abortions, without singling out any particular group. The House in February voted 240-185 to defund Title X in the current budget year.
But even staunch anti-abortion legislators like Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who has crusaded against federal funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, say that jettisoning the Title X program may be going too far.
“I’ve never advocated reducing funding for Title X,” Pence said during a recent radio interview with the chairman of a county Right to Life organization in his home state.
“Title X clinics do important work in our inner cities,” Pence said. “They provide health services for women and children that might not otherwise have access to them.”
Why do I have trouble believing this?
According to Planned Parenthood’s annual report, the $1 billion family planning and health services organization, which provides abortions, receives about a third of its funding through government grants and contracts — including money from Title X for contraceptive and health services.
It received an estimated $342 million through Title X funding between 2002 and 2008.
Pence says that his efforts to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood, which estimates that abortion accounts for less than 4 percent of the services it provides, were never intended to “touch women’s health services.”
Instead, he says, he has been focused on preventing Title X funding from going to an organization that provides legal abortions — even if the funding isn’t used for that procedure.
Oh, that’s why I don’t believe him. He wants to cut off funds to prevent said funds from being used for something they aren’t used for. The lies and base thuggery just seems to get worse by the day.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, says the issues have become conflated.
“Both of them are a huge mistake in terms of public policy, and in terms of women’s reproductive health and rights,” she say, referring to proposals to cut family planning funding. “Both Title X and Planned Parenthood are critical.”
The Republicans’ targeting of Title X, in fact, has brought more attention to the issue overall, say family planning and abortion rights advocates like Northup.
The progressive political organizations Emily’s List, which raises money for women candidates who support legal abortion, and moveon.org last week launched a campaign, “Stop the War on Women,” to mobilize their base against cuts to women’s health programs.
Conservatives like Chuck Donovan at the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, have worked to keep the funding focus on Planned Parenthood.
Yay the Hertiage Foundation. Nice to see the Koch Brothers real conservatives weighing in on this.