CNSNews.com has a long, sad history of perpetuating a falsehood: that federal money to Planned Parenthood pays for abortions. CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey — who has done this before — is all too eager to perpetuate that misinformation. He writes in a Jan. 2 CNS article:
Planned Parenthood says its affiliates did 321,384 abortions in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2016, according to its newly released 2016-2017 annual report.
In the same report, Planned Parenthood says its affiliates received $543.7 million in payments from government—“Government Health Services Reimbursements & Grants,” the report calls them—in the year that ended on June 30, 2017.
Jeffrey does not report, however, that money from Title X and Medicaid — which is where the federal funding to Planned Parenthood comes from — by law cannot pay for abortions.
Then, in his Jan. 3 column, Jeffrey repeated his dishonesty:
Planned Parenthood has now released its 2016-2017 annual report. It says its affiliates performed 321,384 abortions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2016.
It also says Planned Parenthood received $543.7 million in government money in the year that ended on June 30, 2017 — which included the first five months of the Trump administration.
Planned Parenthood takes money from federal taxpayers primarily through Medicaid and the Title X Family Planning Program. In 2012, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis cited by the Congressional Research Service in a May 2017 report, Planned Parenthood affiliates received “$400.56 million in Medicaid reimbursements (including both federal and state dollars)” and “$64.35 million in Title X funding.”
[…]But the Mexico City Policy does not stop federal Medicaid and Title X money from going to domestic Planned Parenthood affiliates — the affiliates that aborted 321,384 babies in the United States in fiscal 2016.
Again, Jeffrey failed to report the inconvenient fact that Medicaid and Title X money does not and cannot pay for abortion. Instead, he rants that Republican spending bills “have permitted federal funding of Planned Parenthood to continue — again, despite the fact that none of that federal funding pays for abortion.