Rand Paul Planeed Parenthood

By Alex Acquisto and Dave Catanese
Lexington Herald-Leader
(TNS) Rand Paul Planned Parenthood

(Lexington Herald-Leader) U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, filed a bill Thursday to block all federal funds from being allocated to the reproductive health care organization Planned Parenthood.

Dubbed the “Defund Planned Parenthood Act,” the bill would simply require that “no federal funds may be made available to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or to any of its affiliates.”

A key objective of the bill is to “ensure federal tax dollars aren’t going to organizations, like Planned Parenthood, to perform abortions,” Paul’s office said in a statement.

But the Hyde Amendment has prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortions since 1977, except in medical emergencies where a pregnant woman’s life is at stake.

However, Planned Parenthood offers an array of health care services in addition to abortion that would theoretically be impacted by Paul’s bill, including sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, pregnancy testing and planning, prenatal and postpartum services, and gender-affirming health care, the latter of which has become a lightning rod for conservative ire in recent years.

As supporters of Paul’s bill pointed out in a series of statements Thursday, the bill is as much about banning the public funding of abortions as it is blocking funding for gender-affirming health care for transgender people.

Rand Paul Planned Parenthood

“Americans rejected Democrats’ extremist abortion-on-demand and radical gender ideology agenda at the ballot box,” Janae Stracke, vice president of Outreach and Advocacy at Heritage Action, said. “The Defund Planned Parenthood Act is an opportunity for conservatives to finally deliver on their decade-old promise to stop taxpayer dollars from funding abortion, and now dangerous experimental medical procedures on minors.”

Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, added, “Planned Parenthood is one of our nation’s largest purveyors of abortion and cross-sex hormones. They do not deserve any taxpayer dollars.”

Defunding Planned Parenthood would “simply be catastrophic,” said Rebecca Gibron, CEO for Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai‘i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky.

Gibron said it would force “health centers to close, stripping thousands of people — right here in the commonwealth and across the country — of the care they rely on to stay healthy and make ends meet. The loss of Medicaid reimbursement, coupled with the loss of the Title X, the nation’s only family planning program, will decimate access to sexual and reproductive health care.”

Planned Parenthood each year provides reproductive health care to more than 2 million people, Gibron said.

“In Kentucky, alone, 35% — about one in three — Planned Parenthood patients rely on Medicaid for vital services like STI testing, cancer screenings and birth control, with most saying we are their only health care provider,” she added.

The long-standing federal prohibitions on abortion funding also apply to patients who are on Medicaid, though individual states have the discretion to choose to pay for abortions for people insured by Medicaid. If they choose to, states have to use their own revenues — not federal funding — to cover the cost of that service, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Abortion is banned in 13 states, including Kentucky, though most states have some restrictions on the procedure. Among the states where abortion isn’t banned, 19, plus the District of Columbia, follow the Hyde Amendment, while 17 use state funds to pay for abortions for women with low incomes who are insured by Medicaid, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Prior to Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban becoming law in 2022, there were only two medical clinics in Kentucky providing elective abortions, both in Louisville: EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood’s Louisville Health Center.

Paul has become an outspoken anti-trans advocate in recent years. A September 2022 reelection ad for Paul featured former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, who has become a firebrand in the GOP’s political fight to block trans women from competing in women’s sports.

In that ad, Gaines said she trained her whole childhood to achieve her dream of swimming competitively.

“But for girls across America, that dream is being taken away by men competing in women’s sports,” she said.

Gaines lauded Paul for “fighting for fairness for women and girls.”

A month earlier at the August 2022 Fancy Farm political picnic, Kelley Paul, speaking in place of her husband, railed against trans women’s participation in women’s sports and blamed Democrats for the proliferation of gender ideology becoming mainstream.

“What are the Democrats teaching our kids? That men can have babies,” she said.

Republicans have tried repeatedly to push through legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, but always fail to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary in the Senate.

In fact, Paul introduced similar legislation a decade ago, seeking to strip the group of $528 million in federal funds it had been allocated. Paul’s bill mustered 53 votes, but not the 60 necessary to break a Democratic filibuster.

A similar outcome is likely this time, even with GOP control of the Senate.

Still, Paul has been a fierce foe of the reproductive health care group for years, consistently looking for ways to choke off funding.

In 2021, Paul claimed victory in preventing a provision in the Senate coronavirus relief package that would have allowed Planned Parenthood affiliates to receive money from the Paycheck Protection Program, designed to help small businesses survive the pandemic.

“I was successful in preventing . . . these funds from going to abortion mills,” Paul said at the time.

This time around, Paul filed his bill on the third day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

Paul’s bill is cosponsored by seven fellow Republican senators: Roger Marshall of Kansas, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Markwayne Mullin Oklahoma, Ted Budd of North Carolina, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Ted Cruz of Texas.

Though his attempt to unilaterally defund Planned Parenthood likely doesn’t have the votes, it likely portends a wider effort within the party, emboldened under Trump, to curb resources for LGBTQ+ citizens.

On his first day in office, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, including rolling back discrimination protections against LGBTQ+ people, ending the use of public funding for gender-affirming medical procedures for transgender inmates in prisons, and his official declaration that there are only “two sexes: male and female.”

One of those orders prohibits the use of federal money for “promoting gender ideology” through grants or other government programming.

The GOP’s collective undermining of the validity of gender identity and moves to prevent trans people from accessing medical resources is happening at the state level in Kentucky, too.

Kentucky Republicans outlawed doctors from providing gender-affirming health care to trans youth in 2023.

Earlier this month, a week into the commonwealth’s regular legislative session, Republicans filed a bill to block the use of state funds, including via Medicare and Medicaid, to pay for “gender transition services,” in House Bill 154.

That bill, from Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington, would also codify into statute that the “General Assembly finds that it would not be in the interest of public health or welfare to use or receive public funds, or for public entities to offer or sponsor health plans that provide benefits or coverage, for gender transition services due to the substantial risks and known harmful effects of those services, including irreversible physical altercations and, in some cases, sterility and lifelong sexual dysfunction.”