Defunding Planned Parenthood: What's Your Argument?

Sometimes, the truth hurts. Then other times, it kills.

My stance on abortion has been made clear. It is murder, plain and simple. The news has been about the sting videos that have surfaced, claiming that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts from aborted fetuses.

So now Planned Parenthood may or may not be selling the body parts of these babies. And now the call for defunding of Planned Parenthood has risen again, louder than before. My problem with all of this is - why are they getting any money in the first place?

Jeb Bush, in what Clinton and many other Democrats called a major gaffe, said Planned Parenthood shouldn’t receive its half a billion dollars of funding from the government, adding that “....I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues….” This comment was made out to be somehow ‘anti-women’ and uncaring. Bush later retracted, saying that he had “misspoke”. However, I think he may have hit the nail on the head.

You see, I’ve done this crazy thing called ‘reading the Constitution’. This rather short document is the highest law of our land. The idea was for it to be the overarching principles that would guide the creation of other, lesser laws that could be more situationally specific. Anyway, I actually read this thing, and search as I might, I could not find anything regarding using tax money to fund women’s health. Or men’s health. Or any kind of health, actually.

In the Federalist Papers, Number 45, written by James Madison, known as the Father of the Constitution, we find this, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined.”

This is made very plain in the document itself. We find that the Tenth Amendment makes very clear that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

If the Constitution doesn’t say the federal government can do it, then only the states or the people have that right. That is why our Founders believed (and hoped) that the federal government would stay relatively small in comparison.

Thomas Jefferson said, “"I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones." The micromanagement that we see from every side from the federal government was never the original intent.

For these reasons, there is no Constitutional argument for funding Planned Parenthood. Whether you believe they are the greatest organization on earth. Whether you believe they are killing babies or not. Whether you believe they are selling the body parts of innocent children or not. There’s nothing in the Constitution that would allow for using taxpayer dollars for such a thing. Women’s health, men’s health, these jurisdictions were not given to the federal government. And if they were not given to the federal government, they are reserved to the states or to the people.

It’s rather a simple principle. The problem it, most have forgotten it. When was the last time you read the Constitution?

Jonathan Paine
painefultruth1776@gmail.com
@painefultruth76