Pro-Abortion States That Gave Away Over $300 Million to Planned Parenthood Now Want Federal Relief Money

Pro-abortion-led states are demanding COVID-19 relief money from the federal government, despite the fact that they’ve been funneling a fortune to Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.

At a time where they should also be fighting to protect the lives of their residents, certain states and localities have continued to grossly mismanage their budgets to keep abortion clinics in business.

As a recent report points out, if these states are short on cash, they have no one to blame but themselves:

[A] look at the checkbooks of these bailout-seeking states reveals that they have mismanaged funds by giving millions of taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States.

Data from government transparency sites, usually maintained by state treasurers or comptrollers, show that over the course of the last four fiscal years states have paid out more than $300 million to Planned Parenthood affiliates. Now, some of the biggest contributors are asking for federal money to cover their nonpandemic-related budget shortfalls.

Maybe if these pro-abortion state officials weren’t draining their coffers to kill babies instead of taking care of their constituents who would actually benefit from the funds, they wouldn’t find themselves in such dire straits.

The wasteful spending that goes on in many states is bad enough, but to stamp your feet and demand money from the federal government – and let’s be honest, the taxpayers – after you’ve given away millions to keep abortionists in business is offensive and immoral. At the very least, it’s fair to say their priorities are appallingly out of line.

But some of these state leaders are firmly committed to performing the will of the powerful abortion industry.  We recently told you how our FOIA request to the Illinois Department of Public Health regarding communications between pro-abortion Governor JB Pritzker, the Illinois Department of Public Health, Illinois NARAL, Personal PAC, and Planned Parenthood Illinois Action concerning Executive Order 2020-10 (the COVID-19 pandemic order for the state of Illinois) revealed over 20,000 emails regarding keeping abortion clinic doors open during the current pandemic. Pritzker, as we told you, demonstrated his allegiance to abortion early on in his administration, signing an abortion bill that removed waiting periods and other important restrictions from abortions and forced insurance companies to pay for them.

And Illinois is only one state. As we’ve previously reported:

It’s important to note that the reason the states want as much money as they can get to cover revenue shortfalls caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is that they don’t want to cut their own budgets .  .  . Many of the states that are pressuring for a federal bailout use part of their budgets to fund abortions.

Sixteen states have a policy to pay for elective abortions under Medicaid, which is a program funded by both federal and state dollars. These states have chosen to use state Medicaid dollars to pay for elective abortion. These states are: Alaska, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.

In addition at least nine states that we know of: Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, California and New York have specific carve outs in their budgets to provide millions of dollars of funding for Planned Parenthood.

If these states were experiencing financial shortages after funding programs to keep kids fed and educated, and mortgages and rents paid, during this time of crisis and had cut unnecessary and harmful line items from their budgets, then by all means let’s look at ways of figuring out how to help close the gap. But these leaders decided killing babies and fulfilling the extreme abortion agenda of the radical Left was worth squandering hundreds of millions of dollars, putting the welfare of their residents in jeopardy. They truly ought to be ashamed.

Now Congress is working toward additional stimulus packages and Coronavirus relief bills. Just as we made sure that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues couldn’t slip a BILLION DOLLARS in abortion funding into the first bill, our legal team will closely monitor and examine any proposed plans during this next round. Any funds earmarked for states and localities must include legislative language preventing any of those funds from being used to fund abortions. And those restrictions must be strictly enforced.

After the last stimulus package was approved, we reported that at least 37 of Planned Parenthood’s 49 affiliates inappropriately sought and unlawfully obtained a total of approximately $80 million from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) – taxpayer funds that were meant to go to small businesses with less than 500 employees as part of the CARES Act. The ACLJ quickly submitted a FOIA request to discover how Planned Parenthood unlawfully obtained Coronavirus relief funding it had no legal claim to, and if the abortion giant committed fraud or other illegal acts.

The bottom line: No federal relief money should ever go to Planned Parenthood or any other abortion providers. Period. Those funds should only be used for one singular purpose – to save lives. The ACLJ will continue to fight tirelessly to make sure that no federal aid is used to take the lives of innocent unborn babies.