The federal funding Planned Parenthood receives does not pay for abortions. CNSNews.com editor Terry Jeffrey knows that. Yet he and CNS have repeatedly sought to falsely portray a linkage between the two.
Jeffrey goes even further in trying to create a false linkage in a pair of recent articles. He writes in an April 8 article:
Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Tait Sye recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that 90 percent of that $363.2 million came directly from the federal government or from Medicaid, a federal-state program. Thus, Planned Parenthood received about $326.88 million from federal programs in 2009.
Although the money from federal programs that went to Planned Parenthood in 2009 theoretically paid for things other than the 332,278 abortions the organization performed that year, the fact remains that Planned Parenthood—an abortion provider–received subsidies from federal programs that equaled about $932 per abortion it performed.
Of course, it’s not theoretical that federal money doesn’t go toward abortions — it’s an undisputed fact, as evidenced by Jeffrey’s use of the fudge term “theoretically.”
And breaking down Planned Parenthood’s federal funding on a per-abortion basis is utterly dishonest and nonsensical since, again, the money is not used on abortion.
Jeffrey doubled down on his dishonesty in an April 9 article in which he complains that the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown “permits federal funding to continue for Planned Parenthood, a group that does an average of 910 abortions per day.”Jeffrey repeated his “theoretically” fudge and his dishonest per-abortion breakdown.
What sort of an example does it set when the head of a “news” organization is so transparently dishonest?