President Trump Signs Controversial 'Planned Parenthood' Legislation

WASHINGTON, DC — President Trump quietly signed legislation Thursday aimed at cutting federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform abortions, which could make it more difficult for women to access birth control, pre-natal care and screening for breast and cervical cancer. Federal law already prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion, with exceptions for cases of rape, incest or life-threatening situations, but Planned Parenthood and other groups receive millions of dollars in funding for providing family health services.

The measure signed by Trump involves federal money granted to states under the Title X Family Planning program, established in 1970 to subsidize family planning programs. The new law undoes rules created during the final days of the Obama administration that required states to pass along the grants to groups, regardless of whether they also perform abortions.

The law cleared Congress only after Vice President Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

Planned Parenthood has received about $60 million annually from Title X, and received $553.7 million in 2015 from federal, state and local governments, which totaled about half of its overall spending. About 3 percent of the services rendered by Planned Parenthood are abortion-related, according to its most recent annual report.

Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement that the new law would hurt the country's most vulnerable women.

"We should build on the tremendous progress made in this country with expanded access to birth control, instead of enacting policies that take us backward," she said. "Too many women still face barriers to health care, especially young women, women of color, those who live in rural areas, and women with low incomes."

In contrast to Trump's common practice of signing laws and regulations in ceremonies broadcast on television, the president held a private signing Thursday for the funding law attended by anti-abortion activists, sans cameras.

“Prioritizing funding away from Planned Parenthood to comprehensive health care alternatives is a winning issue,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, who attended the signing. “We expect to see Congress continue its efforts to redirect additional taxpayer funding away from Planned Parenthood through pro-life health care reform after the spring recess.”

Trump had long championed abortion rights, stating in a 1999 interview that he supported partial-birth abortions. He changed his stance publicly in 2011, when he was considering a run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Less than two months before the 2016 election, Trump tapped Dannenfelser to lead his "Pro-Life Coalition," a late bid to win over social conservative Republicans, who happen to be reliable voters. Dannenfelser actively opposed Trump during the Republican primary, but decided to support him in the general election, she said, because of his late campaign promises to defund Planned Parenthood, to support a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and to nominate only credentialed pro-lifers to the Supreme Court.

With that, he won over a pro-life group with millions of advertising dollars to spend and an effective voter-turnout apparatus led by a hardline conservative who wants to ban all abortions except when the heath of the mother is at stake, making no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

The White House released only a bare-bones statement announcing the signing: "On Thursday, April 13, 2017, the President signed into law: H.J.Res. 43, which nullifies the Department of Health and Human Services rule prohibiting recipients of Title X grants for the provision of family planning services from excluding a sub-grantee from participating for reasons other than its ability to provide Title X services."

Trump waited only a few days after taking office to sign an executive order days that reinstated the so-called Mexico City policy, also known as the global gag rule. That order blocks federal funding to any nongovernmental organization around the world that provides abortion counseling, even if the money is not used for abortion-related services.

The Title X law signed Thursday was passed as a joint resolution under the the Congressional Review Act — a once-obscure 1996 law that allows lawmakers "to overturn any regulation imposed during the final six months of the previous administration, with a simple majority vote in each chamber of Congress."

Already this year, GOP lawmakers have used the Review Act to repeal about a dozen Obama-era regulations, including rules that had prevented internet providers from tracking and selling people's browsing and app activity, restricted gun sales to the mentally ill, and imposed anti-corruption requirements on the oil industry.

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