Mother Jones
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As a secretive anti-abortion group continues to leak videos selectively edited to portray Planned Parenthood officials breaking federal law, a swarm of states, from New Hampshire to Utah, have renewed efforts to strip the country’s largest women’s health care organization of government funding.
The number of attacks is unprecedented. Just a few weeks after Republicans in Congress made a failed attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Utah—have cut off Planned Parenthood from federal and state Medicaid dollars. The funds, intended for low-income women, pay for family planning services, breast cancer and STI screenings, and abortions in cases of rape or threats to the health or life of the mother. The Obama administration warned two governors that the move violated federal law protecting patients’ rights to choose their provider. But that didn’t stop new states, including Arkansas, from continuing to slash the funds after the warning came down.
“This is the longest and broadest set of attacks we have seen,” says Elizabeth Nash, a researcher for the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights think tank.
But history shows that anti-abortion lawmakers don’t need damning videos to mount attacks on Planned Parenthood. A look back at these older attempts to defund Planned Parenthood shows that today’s onslaught is part of a broader, three-decade-old campaign by anti-abortion lawmakers to jeopardize family planning dollars.
This timeline traces the history of the crusade against Planned Parenthood, and with it, the destruction of family planning programs that continues today.
1979
The Minnesota legislature passes a sweeping law to end all state family planning funding to groups offering abortion, abortion counseling, or referrals. A federal judge strikes down the law in 1980, noting, “Planned Parenthood’s unpopularity in and of itself and without reference to some independent considerations in the public interest cannot justify the law.” Similar laws in Arizona and North Dakota also tank. Anti-abortion activists start seeking a work-around to the rulings.
1980
In Utah, lawmakers reroute $390,000 in family planning funds from the Planned Parenthood’s five clinics to county health departments.
1984
The Reagan administration imposes a new policy that prevents any foreign funding from going to health care providers that perform abortions. The move applies to hundreds of millions of dollars the government sets aside to promote family planning in impoverished countries. The policy is in place until President Bill Clinton rolls it back in 1993.
Colorado approves a constitutional amendment banning state funds from being spent on abortions.
1985
California legislators accidentally send Gov. George Deukmejian a version of the state budget that bars any group providing abortion services from receiving money from the state’s $34 million annual family planning budget. Deukmejian, a Republican, refuses to veto the measure, which lawmakers had previously voted to remove. “The clear target of the provision, which was introduced…at the request of anti-abortion groups, is Planned Parenthood and its 16 local affiliates,” the Los Angeles Times reported. An appeals court struck the measure down.
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Original source:
The Unauthorized History of the GOP’s 30-Year War on Planned Parenthood
