Republicans in the Ohio Senate joined the bandwagon of their extremist brethren nationwide on Thursday and
voted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood in the next state budget. The vote of 23-10 was along party lines. The bill will be taken up in a Senate-House conference committee on Wednesday.
The Senate-passed budget would also redirect state monies to coercive, right-wing-run "pregnancy crisis centers" where staff members, often none of them with medical training, provide deceptive information to women and hammer them with emotional anti-abortion appeals. It would prohibit funding of any rape crisis center that dares to refer women to abortion providers.
And then, the icing. Another provision in the budget would require ambulatory clinics to have written transfer agreements to hospitals in case complications arose from any procedure they provide. But, Catch-22, abortion clinics would be specifically prohibited from having a transfer agreement with any public hospital or from entering into a contract with any physician who has admitting privileges at a public hospital. Requiring them to obtain something they are forbidden from obtaining would mean the clinics would have to stop providing abortions altogether. Which is the point. Roe v. Wade be-damned.
It's just one more effort by extremist forced-birthers to place abortion out of reach of women who cannot, for whatever reasons—typically financial or age-related—travel to another state where the procedure is more easily obtained.
Planned Parenthood has been the target of these extremists a couple of decades. But in the past three years, there has been a serious escalation from the days when protesters harassed clients entering Planned Parenthood clinics. Lawmakers from Texas to Wisconsin, from Arizona to North Carolina have sought means of defunding the non-profit's family-planning operations despite the fact that, under the Hyde Amendment, no tax money pays for abortions in these states anyway.
This war on women's reproductive rights doubles as a class war since Planned Parenthood serves women hard-pressed to afford what the clinics offer free, such as breast and gynecological exams. Lawmakers and the lobbyists who hold them in thrall in Ohio and elsewhere are perfectly willing to lie to women and to risk their lives by denying them access to measures designed to give early warnings of potentially lethal disease.
In other words, they have no compunction about killing women in service to their extremist ideology. Goes to show just how evil the pretense of "pro-life" can be.