Mike Pence launched Republicans’ war on Planned Parenthood

Republicans have targeted Planned Parenthood with laser-like focus for nearly a decade.

The House has repeatedly voted to defund the women’s health group. Congress has convened multiple committees to investigate it. And at least 10 states with Republican governors have taken steps to defund Planned Parenthood locally.

It all started with vice-president Mike Pence, who will speak at today’s March for Life.

As a member of Congress, Pence sponsored the first bill to defund Planned Parenthood in 2007 — and did so repeatedly through 2011, when it finally passed the House.

I happened to have interviewed Pence about his criticism of Planned Parenthood that year, and it was clearly an issue he was passionate about. He had been working to defund the organization for years at that point, even while his colleagues focused on other issues.

“If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions,” Pence told me, sitting in his congressional office. “As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”

Pence’s previous record on Planned Parenthood suggests that defunding it could remain a priority for him if he became vice president. As Steve Ertelt, a writer at the anti-abortion website LifeNews, argues, “His selection would go a long way towards mollifying concerns some pro-life voters have had about Trump.”

Pence worked doggedly on the issue before it rose to national prominence. Before that, defunding Planned Parenthood wasn’t something Congress talked about much at all.

“What was apparent to me then was there was some unwritten agreement that we had arrived at, an unstated truce between pro-abortion and pro-life legislators,” Pence told me in 2011. “When we introduced this, it was a completely different element in the equation.”

After his first attempt to defund Planned Parenthood failed — offered as an amendment to an appropriations bill in 2007 — he got to work setting the groundwork for future bills. He requested a Government Accountability Office report on how much money abortion clinics receive from the federal government to bolster his case.

Federal law already prohibits government spending from paying for abortions. But abortion clinics like Planned Parenthood have traditionally received money for other routine health care services they provide, like STD testing or annual exams to provide birth control.

But Pence felt like he could make it harder for Planned Parenthood clinics to provide abortions if they were losing their other revenue streams.

“What’s clear to me [is] if you follow the money, you can actually take the funding supports out of abortion,” he says. “We then have a much better opportunity to move forward to be a society that says yes to life.”

Pence sponsored an amendment to defund Planned Parenthood in 2011, and it did pass — although not without causing turmoil at the time. Here is what Politico reported at the time:

That amendment managed to suck up three hours of often emotional debate time Thursday night, which is a big part of the reason the health care law defunding votes got pushed into today.

Pence, of Indiana, touched off a vicious back-and-forth Thursday night in which Republicans insisted the organization is too aggressive about performing abortions and several Democrats charged that the GOP was waging a “war on women.”

That vote essentially opened up the floodgates: The House has now voted eight times to defund Planned Parenthood. Legislators took up the fight with renewed vigor in 2015, when the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress released sting videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials profiting off procuring fetal tissue for researchers.

As Indiana’s governor, Pence has continued to push back against Planned Parenthood. He has cut public funding to its clinics by more than $1 million. Last year, he launched an investigation of the group’s fetal tissue disposal practices after the CMP videos were released. The investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.