By Dave Andrusko
Pro-life Speaker of the House John Boehner
A brief item as we finish National Right to Life News Today for Thursday. Planned Parenthood is using POLITICO (as it often does) to float a trial balloon: woe to pro-life Republicans running for President who dare to question whether PPFA ought to continue to receive hundreds of millions of dollars of state and federal money.
PPFA provided Sarah Kliff with an “exclusive”: the “results of a survey of likely female voters in the New Hampshire Republican [Presidential] primary.” According to Kliff, they found “a quarter of the female Republicans ‘unwilling’ to support a Republican candidate who would defund Planned Parenthood. Overall, 38 percent opposed barring federal funding for Planned Parenthood health centers and 35 percent had a ‘favorable’ opinion of Planned Parenthood and the services it provides.”
PPFA considers these numbers to be a “threat” to pro-life Republicans in the Granite State? We don’t have the raw numbers, the exact way the questions were asked, or the order. But you can be sure a poll commissioned by PPFA would be geared to get the maximum number of affirmative responses.
Yet look at the percentages of female Republicans responding in a way PPFA wants: “a quarter,” 38%, and 35%. PPFA which has polished its image for forever (with the help of a compliant press) can get barely a third of female Republicans in New Hampshire to say they have a “favorable” opinion of “PPFA and the services it provides.”
What are the odds, by the way, that the questions were posed to leave the impression that abortion constitutes a tiny, tiny portion of PPFA’s “services” (in fact, 12% of PPFA’s clients receive abortions) and that the largest abortion provider in the United States hardly makes any money off of abortion (when in fact more than a third of what Planned Parenthood took in in clinic revenues came from abortions, based on the conservative assumption that PPFA charged the going rate for the basic first trimester surgical abortion?
Stayed tuned.
Your feedback is vital. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha