Arkansas AG Asks Judge To OK Planned Parenthood Defunding

A federal judge on Friday said Arkansas must pay Planned Parenthood for Medicaid services to three women while she considers a lawsuit challenging the state’s decision to cut off funding over secretly recorded videos by an anti-abortion group.

Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart on Wednesday denounced the push to defund Planned Parenthood amid the organization’s ongoing scandal, despite admitting he hasn’t watched the videos.

“Planned Parenthood is an organization that cares about one thing: making a profit at the expense of women’s health”, said ADF Legal Communications Director Kerri Kupec.

“I can not get to the point, though, where I say that Planned Parenthood should be completely defunded”.

Read Saturday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

The office had been vandalized within the last 30 days, when another window was broken, but it wasn’t immediately known if the two incidents were connected, Reilly said.

Jenna Tosh, chief executive of Planned Parenthood in Santa Barbara, explained that the Thousand Oaks center sees more than 7,000 patients per year, and also provides a wide net of health care services such as birth control, sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, and such preventative care as cancer screenings. Their report, which was chiefly concerned with protecting Planned Parenthood against criminal charges, was only able to unearth the use of “ominous music, replays, color manipulation”, and other complete irrelevancies.

The AG’s filing said that if Baker does issue an injunction, it should be limited to the three unnamed women named as plaintiffs in the case. Planned Parenthood has said the organization receives legal payment only for the cost of the procedure and requires a mother’s consent before the tissue is given to researchers. She also ruled that the women were suing the state as individuals and not on behalf of other women, noting there had not been a request to make the lawsuit a class-action case.

Cecile Richard, the president of Planned Parenthood, testified before Congress about the videos that were released showing the illegal selling of fetal tissue.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland did not appear in any of the videos and doesn’t participate in any fetal tissue donation, its attorneys have said. Planned Parenthood has filed similar lawsuits in Utah, Louisiana and Alabama challenging the defunding moves.