Boo! Planned Parenthood In PA Might Be Defunded!

We are so SICK of people trying to control women's reproductive health.

It's personal and is and always will be SOLELY up to them. Passing legislature to restrict is is deplorable.

First Arizona, and now we have to worry about Pennsylvania too. What the hell is going through republican minds these days? (Mind you, not ALL republicans are bad, but nobody else is trying to pull this shizz.)

Pennsylvania State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-Butler) (see? republican.) will introduce legislation that would defund Planned Parenthood. This adds his state to a list of five others that have pending bills to strip public funds from the family planning provider.

Stop it, people. Planned Parenthood provides an invaluable service, and you should be ashamed for this.

In what has to be a joke, he's calling this legislature the Whole Woman’s Health Funding Priority Act (like HE should decide what a woman's health priority is). It would put health care providers that offer abortion services at the bottom of the priority list for state funding. The anti-abortion activist group, (no activist group should really be allowed to help write anything) Susan B. Anthony List and the Alliance Defense Fund co-wrote the bill. It's shockingly similar to Arizona's.

Get this: The clinics use the government funds to offer breast cancer screenings, STD testing and treatment, pap smears, maternity care and other medical services for low-income and uninsured patients. None of this money can legally be used to pay for abortions, which make up less than 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood performs.

Which makes us ask — why do these activists and these people in the government hate women's health? Why do they want to interfere at all?

Where is the sense of having a 'government that governs the least' when you're making a point to govern in areas you have no business governing??

All this does is hurt women in low-income situations, regardless of the claim this "upgrades" their care. Here's why: Planned Parenthood patients live in low-income, rural and medically underserved areas where there generally aren't other viable providers of the same types of services.

And then this happens, says Jeff Teague of PP:

"In the past our clients would qualify for services for free, but now we have to charge them a fee. It's put a burden on people, obviously. We've seen a ten percent decrease in patient numbers, and we've worked very closely with health department to see if they've seen a corresponding increase, and they have not. We have a serious concern that there are a number of women not receiving or delaying care, which is a bad situation either way."

Let's get real here for a second. This year alone, Arizona already took funds from PP — and legislators dropped similar proposed laws in Iowa and New Hampshire. Maine just cut $400k for family planning services out of the state budget this week.

FIVE other states are trying to do the same thing. Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Have you all lost your minds??

We're supposed to progress as a nation, not regress!

Right now the estimated result of these proposed cuts could leave 350k patients without health service. If Romney is elected and sticks to his promises to get rid of PP completely, we'll have to watch that number reach 5 million.

Which, in our eyes, is just a disgusting number.

A woman's health and reproductive health are private matters. LEAVE IT UP TO THEM, and quit pushing backward and hurtful beliefs on the nation through politics.

[Image via AP Images.]

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