When Toni McFadden was a senior in high school, she walked through the doors of a Planned Parenthood clinic hoping to escape her unplanned pregnancy and return to life as normal.
But the abortion pills they gave her didn’t work. One month later, she experienced severe hemorrhaging owing to complications and received no help from the abortion clinic.
“If I could go back, knowing what I know now, I would give my baby life without hesitation,” McFadden said. “Planned Parenthood didn’t care about me. They didn’t care about my baby, and they don’t care about women, especially minority women. They exploit women for their own financial gain. This is why they must be defunded.”
McFadden joined lawmakers and other pro-life advocates in front of the Capitol on Thursday to urge Congress to defund Planned Parenthood and “big abortion.”
More than 150 groups, united under an initiative called Defund Planned Parenthood, signed a letter Wednesday urging Congress to cut Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers through the budget reconciliation process.
This comes as the Trump administration moves to freeze tens of millions of dollars in federal family-planning grants to certain organizations, including Planned Parenthood affiliates.
Planned Parenthood clinics that could be affected by the freeze were set to receive about $20 million in family-planning grants this year under a program known as Title X, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. During the freeze, the administration will examine whether any of the money was used for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, contrary to Trump’s executive order on the subject.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said at the Defund Planned Parenthood event that Democrats have found loopholes in the Hyde Amendment that allow them to push their abortion agenda onto the backs of American taxpayers. The Hyde Amendment, which dates to the mid-1970s, nominally bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortion, except for cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother.
One of the government’s basic duties is to defend life, Tuberville said, and he affirmed his commitment to working with his Senate Republican colleagues to defund Planned Parenthood.
President Donald Trump agrees that no taxpayer funds should be used to pay for abortion, the Alabama lawmaker said.
“President Trump is the most pro-life president we’ve had, and somebody’s finally stepped up to the plate and said, ‘Enough is enough’ with Planned Parenthood spending taxpayer dollars,” Tuberville told The Daily Signal in an interview.
“I think that’s what this whole thing is about. If we can shut down these entities that are taxpayer-funded, you’re not going to have enough people in general giving money to these places to stay open,” he said.
Planned Parenthood received almost $700 million in taxpayer funding in the form of government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements in its 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to its annual report. The funds made up 34% of its total revenue during that year. The abortion provider also received $997.5 million in private contributions, according to the report.
Abortions made up more than 97% of pregnancy-resolution services provided at Planned Parenthood facilities from 2021 to 2022, according to the annual report.
Mayra Rodriguez spent 17 years inside Planned Parenthood as a center director in Arizona. She said the organization is not about choice and comprehensive health care.
“Despite their billion-dollar budget, their primary focus was not health care. It was abortion,” Rodriguez said. “Women who walked through our doors seeking prenatal care, adoption referrals, or real life-affirming support were turned away. … When the government gives half-a-billion dollars to Planned Parenthood, there is no way to separate that money from the abortion business.”
A New York Times report last month found the majority of donations Planned Parenthood receives go toward legal and political efforts to protect abortion rights, rather than funding care at its clinics. Recent cases of botched care have landed the abortion provider in a tangle of malpractice lawsuits, according to the report.
Longtime Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., co-chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, urged his colleagues in Congress to defund big abortion through the budget reconciliation process.
“Reconciliation legislation offers an important opportunity to stop funding abortion purveyors like Planned Parenthood,” Smith said. “This is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.”
Pro-life activists haven’t had the same opportunity since Republicans held a congressional majority in 2017, according to Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
Depriving Planned Parenthood of federal funding could be the death knell for it as an institution, she said.
“They’re already teetering on the brink, and they seem to have survived scandal after scandal … every single one of those scandals to the detriment of women or their staff, and they’ve survived,” Dannenfelser told The Daily Signal. “I think now is the moment.”
If Congress takes funding away from abortion providers, McFadden said those taxpayer dollars should go instead toward supporting women through providing things such as birth control, housing, and better health care.
“I don’t think that when another person is intentionally killed is health care,” McFadden, now the mother of four, told The Daily Signal. “As someone who has walked through it and the aftermath of it, I wish I would have had to walk through my pregnancy. I think that even placing my baby up for adoption would have been way better than me having to live with the fact that I ended the life of my own child for the rest of my life.”
