Kansas Moves to Defund Planned Parenthood

What Congress could not do for the nation, the Kansas State legislature hopes to do for the people of Kansas: Save them from the rampaging horror of (mostly) ladies who want to provide legal health services to (mostly) other ladies at an affordable cost.

Abortion politics could take a new twist in Kansas with a budget plan that would make the state the first in the nation to strip funding from Planned Parenthood.

Budgets winding their way through the Legislature would redirect about $300,000 in federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood to state and local health clinics.

The move is similar to one in Washington that almost led to a government shutdown early this month, when Republicans wanted to shut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood in the belief that it provided indirect support for abortions.

Now, the battle is trickling down to the states.

This trickle-down fuckonomics has trickled down to Indiana, too. Kansas and Indiana are only the first two states in what will almost certainly become a nationwide trend, part of the rightwing's chip away at Roe strategy.

The Planned Parenthood funding in question comes from federal Title IX funds and is thus earmarked for reproductive planning services. In Kansas, the funding amounts to $2.9 million, $300k of which is distributed between nine clinics in Wichita and Hays run by Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri (PPKM), where a variety of services are provided to "nearly 9,000 people, of whom about 80 percent qualify for subsidized family-planning services," according to Peter Brownlie, president of PPKM.

While Planned Parenthood wouldn't have to shut its doors in those cities, losing federal funds would mean fewer low-income women would be served, Brownlie said.

It could be a bigger problem in Hays in western Kansas, where family-planning services are limited. Of the eight counties adjoining Ellis County, where Hays is located, four have no such services, Brownlie said. The four other counties have limited services.

While the stated intention may be to divert that money to other agencies, Brownlie questioned whether there were plans — or even the capacity — for others to meet the needs of women.

See, the great idea Republicans are proposing is to just redirect that funding to other clinics, without regard for where those clinics are. All they care about is defunding Planned Parenthood, because it provides abortions among its many services, and if they can't make abortion illegal, then they'll settle for making it inaccessible, despite the fact that reducing access to abortion does not reduce its numbers; it merely makes the procedure less safe.

The evident reality is that anti-choicers don't care that women will die getting back alley abortions. As far as they're concerned, that's just desserts for being a baby-killing whore.

"If that money is taken away from Planned Parenthood, fewer low-income people would get family planning services in Kansas, more will get pregnant and more will have abortions," [Brownlie] predicted.

But abortion foes insist on eliminating money for Planned Parenthood from the state budget.

"We oppose the taking of innocent human life," said Kathy Ostrowski, state legislative director of Kansans for Life.

But we're okay with causing the unintentional and preventable deaths of dirty sluts reads the subtext.

I've said before that I find the "pro-life" position to be inherently violent because it forces women to do something painful and bloody with their bodies that they don't want to do. Here, then, is another example of the inherent violence of the "pro-life" position: Criminalizing and/or reducing access to abortion will demonstrably result in the deaths of pregnant people seeking to terminate pregnancy through any means possible.

To know that and to not care is indecent and cruel. I can't say it any more plainly than that.