In the hope
of averting a government shutdown at the end of the month, a moderate
Republican congressman from Pennsylvania has proposed a compromise on Planned
Parenthood funding.
Rep.
Charlie Dent’s bill would take away money only from clinics involved in selling
tissue from aborted fetuses. That would
defund the seven abortion clinics in three states that, according to undercover
videos which surfaced recently, were accused of profiting illegally from
selling fetal tissue.
However,
Dent’s measure is similar to a bill that went nowhere in the Senate. Republican
Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Kirk
of Illinois and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tried the same approach – ending federal
funding for the specified Planned Parenthood affiliates while leaving funding
in pace for all other Planned Parenthood clinics.
That bill
never came up for a vote. Instead, the Senate took up and rejected legislation to
remove all federal funding from Planned Parenthood. A similar bill will likely
come to the House floor later this week.
According to the New York Times, Dent’s bill, which has some Republican
support but no House Democrats yet, would also require a 90-day investigation
by the attorney general of the seven
clinics and new provisions that would make it more difficult for all clinics to
change the way they perform abortions to help extract tissues for sale.
“There
are going to be some on the right who only want total defunding of Planned
Parenthood and some on the left who don’t want to deal with this issue at all,
but I think this is something both sides can look at,” Dent told the Times.
