FRC Says Planned Parenthood, Desperate to Hide Agenda, Attacks Hatch and Hides Intent

FRC Says Planned Parenthood, Desperate to Hide Agenda, Attacks Hatch and Hides
Intent

WASHINGTON, July 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Family Research Council
President Tony Perkins responded today to the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America's patently false attack on Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Hatch last week
drew attention to Sen. Barbara Mikulski's (D-MD) attempt to mandate inclusion
of the nation's largest network of abortion in a national health care scheme.
Perkins said:

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080930/FRCLOGO )

"Planned Parenthood, the nation's leading practitioner of abortion on demand
at its hundreds of facilities across the country, has issued a completely
false attack on Sen. Orrin Hatch. At the legislative mark-up on Friday in the
Senate health committee, Sen. Hatch queried Sen. Barbara Mikulski on a
cleverly worded amendment she added to the bill to ensure that Planned
Parenthood's clinics, 295 of which perform abortions and all of which actively
promote and refer for them (see
(http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-center/abortion-services-abortion-referrals-25993.htm),
are included in the bill's definition of community health services.

"The term 'abortion' is almost never used by advocates for abortion inside and
outside of Congress. They virtually always couch their support for abortion
in such euphemisms such as 'family planning,''comprehensive health services,'
and 'reproductive health' to lull the public into thinking that abortion is
not part of the equation.

"Because the bill as written has no exclusion for abortion in its language,
there is no doubt that Sen. Milkulski's amendment opens the floodgates to
massive public underwriting of abortion, a position Planned Parenthood has
always favored. Sen. Hatch is to be commended for his clarity in pointing
this fact out to the American people, who oppose public subsidies for abortion
by a margin of at least two to one.

"Now caught in the first of what is likely to be many maneuvers to achieve
their goal, Planned Parenthood is launching a spurious and erroneous assault
on Sen. Hatch. In fact, it is the insistence of Planned Parenthood and other
groups that abortion be included, by hook or by crook, in a national health
reform that jeopardizes what Americans really want and need, which is a health
care system that encourages responsibility and family ownership of health care
through market and tax policy reforms that provide portability, protect
conscience, promote affordability, and avoid government of the health care
system itself.

"Sen. Milkulski's own radical record is clear. (See
http://www.ontheissues.org/Senate/Barbara_Mikulski.htm) She opposed limits on
partial-birth abortion, voted against the 'unborn child rule' to protect poor
women pregnant for the first time in S-CHIP, opposed 'Laci and Connor's Law'
to allow federal penalties in certain cases when a lethal assault upon a woman
results in the death of her child in utero, voted for the cloning of human
beings, and voted against the right of parents to know if their minor child is
being taken across state lines for an abortion to evade local law.

"Family Research Council is calling on all Americans who support current law
to thank Sen. Hatch for protecting the right of Americans not to be compelled
to fund abortion. We call on the Congress to explicitly and permanently ban
abortion from any health care reform plan considered this year."

SOURCE Family Research Council

JP Duffy or Maria Donovan of Family Research Council, +1-866-FRC-NEWS