Trump’s plan for Title X funds is right, reasonable

WHATEVER your feelings about abortion, there’s no reasonable argument that taxpayers should be forced to subsidize an abortion chain that already operates handsomely in the black with the help of thousands of millionaire celebrity donors.

President Trump’s action last week, barring Title X family planning funds from programs and facilities that perform abortions, is thus entirely right and reasonable. For all Planned Parenthood’s gnashing of teeth, the only thing to suffer will be its own profits and the rewards of its senior executives. The public good and women’s health will, at a minimum, remain unaffected and, depending on your perspective, will be improved.

Trump’s decision will not reduce Title X funding at all. Rather, his policy guarantees that the limited funds available from that source will go to comprehensive community health centers all over America that provide health services Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer. There are 20 such community health centers for every Planned Parenthood affiliate. Most provide services such as mammograms that Planned Parenthood doesn’t offer. Most are also not so heavily involved and invested in partisan politics.

Given all this, taxpayer subsidy of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider, amounts to a federal prioritization of abortion over women’s health.

In theory, Title X money cannot pay for abortion as a form of family planning. But it has long been misinterpreted to require recipient programs at least to refer women to abortionists. Trump’s change at last ends this, going back to the law as it is written rather than as the abortion industry and its advocates wish and pretend it to be.

Even better, the rule change requires that all Title X recipients comply with and document their compliance with state laws on reporting cases of sexual assault, incest or rape. Planned Parenthood affiliates have an especially disgraceful and slipshod track record on this. Planned Parenthood affiliates are also known to disregard state parental notification laws, which are in part intended to prevent abuse. A California affiliate even told an undercover journalism student posing as a 15-year-old simply to lie about her age on official forms so that there wouldn’t be trouble for her and the 23-year-old man she said had impregnated her.

That’s yet one more reason taxpayers should have nothing to do with subsidizing any abortion chain. Even those who have no moral qualms about abortion should be wary in this #MeToo era of how abortion is frequently used to clean up after the sexual abuse of minor girls, and to conceal it.

Planned Parenthood will miss the $50 million-$60 million it typically gets each year through Title X, but it should never have been getting that public largesse in the first place.

No one has a legitimate complaint about losing an unmerited and unneeded flow of other people’s money. Least of all should such whining come from an organization that leads the nation in the cynical extinguishing of innocent human life.