Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, today, I come to the House floor to stand up for women's health.

Republicans are using a heavily edited, agenda-driven series of videos that falsely portray Planned Parenthood's participation in tissue donation programs that support lifesaving scientific research. These outrageous and false claims about Planned Parenthood have been discredited. Edited and distorted video should not undermine the incredible work that Planned Parenthood does across this country in providing critical health care to millions of women.

This bill to defund Planned Parenthood would not defund abortion. Only three percent of all health services provided by Planned Parenthood are abortion services, and these services already cannot be paid for with federal funding. What this bill would defund is basic health services for millions of women. Planned Parenthood provides family planning counseling and contraception to 2.1 million patients, 400,000 lifesaving screenings for cervical cancer, nearly 500,000 breast exams, and nearly 4.5 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

Despite news this week that the number of uninsured Americans decreased by 8.8 million last year thanks to the Affordable Care Act, 33 million Americans still have no health insurance. Perhaps hardest hit by this defunding effort will be the women who live in one of the 20 states that have declined the Medicaid expansion provided by the Affordable Care Act and who rely on Planned Parenthood for lifesaving health care.

Defunding Planned Parenthood would also be devastating for low-income communities, women of color, and young people. It would unravel our nation's reproductive health safety net. Planned Parenthood health centers comprise 10% of all publicly funded family planning centers, and serve 36% of all clients who obtain care from the nation's network of family planning providers. The view of some Republicans that federal funding could simply be redistributed to other health care centers and providers ignores where Planned Parenthood health centers are located. They are not typically on Main Street, but rather in areas and neighborhoods where they are most needed. For example, a new Planned Parenthood center currently under construction here in D.C. is located in a underserved area in Ward 5 whose population greatly needs access to the health services that Planned Parenthood provides.

Unfortunately, we in the District of Columbia know all too well this type of assault on women's reproductive health and Planned Parenthood. Whenever Republicans have controlled the House, they have imposed a devastating rider on the District that prevents us from spending our locally raised taxes on abortion services for low-income women, singling us out as the only jurisdiction in the country that cannot spend its local tax dollars for such purposes. We were successful in getting that rider removed from the Senate's fiscal year 2016 D.C. Appropriations bill, and we will continue to fight to have the rider removed from any final spending bill.

I urge my colleagues to vote no on this hyper-partisan bill, which would devastate women's access to health services, most drastically in low-income and minority communities.

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