Rejecting the Pence Amendment

The House of Representatives voted on a bill entitled the Pence Amendment to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding. The margin came down to 240 to 185 in favor to stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the leading reproductive health care provider. The pence amendment will stop 102 affiliated reproductive health care organizations from receiving any federal funding including STD testing, cancer screenings, and pregnancy testing. Cutting the funding of Planned Parenthood is supposed to be apart of the budget cut because of the countries debt. According to Mike Pence (with whom the pence amendment is named after) Planned Parenthood receives 363 million dollars from the U.S government. If this bill is past many women’s lives will be at risk. The pence amendment will cut 4.8 of Planned Parenthoods patients which is 1.4 million people, most of which who are low income patients. The idea of cutting funding for Planned Parenthood seems ridiculous, and narrow minded. The idea of saying that the country will save such an amount of money is just a smoke screen for why people like Mike Pence really want to cut the funding, and its because of religious moral reasons. But the problem is that Planned Parenthood provides more needs than just abortion. Its helps all women and men to be able to safely test for STD’s, women to have breast cancer screenings, and provides women and men with information on ways of preventing unwanted pregnancies and having safe sex. Many republicans who voted for the bill believe that stopping funding to Planned Parenthood is going to put an end to abortion and save lives, but it’s going to have the exact opposite effect. Not only will this amendment not end abortion its going to force women to conduct more self abortions, putting more lives at risk. This goes far beyond a religious moral concern; this is about people’s rights and people’s lives. Whether you believe abortion is right or not one thing that people should be able to agree on is that if these women are going to make this decision they should be able to be in a safe clean place for the procedure rather than in an un sanitized environment using coat hangers and endangering their lives. If a woman feels she needs an abortion she’s going to get an abortion, that’s a fact many people opposed need to come to terms with, so rather the abortion be in a clean, safe, sterilized place. Sometimes people need to be less stubborn about their beliefs and realize what’s probably best for the safety of people rather than what their believes say what they can and cannot be involved in.

Rejecting the Pence Amendment

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