Almost 75% of the roughly 1.2 million abortions occurring in America annually, DO NOT OCCUR in Planned Parenthood facilities.  Yet the interminable crusade to strip them of funding persists unabated.

Republican politicians are ignoring all of those other clinics and the 900,000 abortions they provided because they really don’t care about ending abortion.  They want a high profile scalp. They just want to take down a “name brand” to thrill their base.

They don’t want a solution.  They want the issue!

It is essential to point out that Republicans and anti-choice advocates persistently refuse to acknowledge the simple concept that explains exactly how Planned Parenthood is “funded” by taxpayer dollars.  Within its proper context, most all anti-choice proponents seem incapable of following a preponderance of facts and keeping pertinent information straight in their heads; as one might review an accounting ledger and conclude that “This just can’t be correct,” because they simply can’t accept the undesired results of basic applied mathematics.  Their perpetual deception is in contending that lump sums of federal cash are summarily handed over annually to Planned Parenthood that then dissolve into its pool of “fungible” and therefore untraceable assets.  This same deception is invoked when they argue that the Hyde Amendment is thusly circumvented and therefore ineffective.

Using that same logic, then American Conservatives should be opposing federal aid to Israel on those same grounds.

“… Israel’s abortion law (is) now among world’s most liberal.
Despite its conservative leanings, government approves free pregnancy termination for nearly all women, and it barely causes a ripple”

http://www.timesofisrael.co…

The fungible nature of U.S. tax dollars given to Israel certainly extends that argument to meaning that some U.S. tax dollars are funding abortions in Israel.  However, given the conservatives’ propensity for cognitive dissonance, it is unlikely that they will extend their selective moral outrage to include Israel.  Conservatives are loathe to follow their own moral ideals or policies to their logical conclusions.  We see this all the time.

Still somehow they insist that it is the liberal brain that suffers from terminal malfunction.

Planned Parenthood, like many other healthcare providers has contracts with Medicaid that designate them as an approved provider of health services accepting Medicaid patients.  Like all other similar providers, they are reimbursed by the government for each service provided to a Medicaid patient.  If no Medicaid patients show up seeking medical care, then no federal reimbursements are received.

In the two percent of all Planned Parenthood clinics where surgical abortion services are available, that particular legal medical procedure is NOT reimbursed under the Hyde Amendment (except for cases involving rape, incest, or threat to the life of the mother).  In any given populous geographic location there usually are OTHER hospitals and/or medical clinics that also provide the same array of women’s healthcare services as Planned Parenthood — including abortions — and they are bound by the very same reimbursement limitations.  Therefore, all of those non-Planned Parenthood healthcare providers can be considered as receiving “funding” from the Federal government in the form of Medicaid reimbursements.

Republican legislators (i.e. as in Arkansas) pandering to the whims of anti-abortion factions freely admit that they want to void Medicaid reimbursement contracts with ALL Planned Parenthood clinics, as punishment for abortion procedures provided anywhere within that organization’s nationwide network of healthcare providers.  They justify universal denial of Constitutionally protected rights of all women by citing their own adherence to a singular moral imperative that — as it turns out — is not universally applied.

No one in the media will point out one central and glaringly undeniable fact: There is absolutely no call in any legislature to strip Medicaid reimbursements from ANY medical facilities in the nation which provide abortion services—with the singular exception of those specifically affiliated with Planned Parenthood.  So conservative and religious idealism stops at the waters’ edge.

Placing Planned Parenthood at the dead-center of this controversy is entirely about political pandering to a conservative constituency that comprises the Republican base.  And the corporate news media, where controversy is a commodity, absently enables this monumental charade in order to promulgate controversial “content” that drives their own ratings and revenues.