It seems a bit counterintuitive. If all the right people are in charge, having been granted what everyone is calling a “popular mandate,” how hard could it possibly be to cross the finish line? And yet, every time we approach it, we suddenly seem to question whether we should have even started the race in the first place. Do we really want to incur the inevitable blowback that always comes with political change? Is it really worth it? Maybe it’d be just fine to let things be.
It’s that kind of political apathy that sent the House on its Independence Day recess a bit early this year. Sure, they had difficult things to do — like passing the SAVE Act and preventing Planned Parenthood from reacquiring federal funding — but the hamburgers were calling (okay, and maybe Speaker of the House Mike Johnson needed to work on sweetening the deal for a few more Republicans to vote on the SAVE Act).
Then, July 5 rolled around, and the portion of the Big Beautiful Bill that had effectively defunded Planned Parenthood and two other smaller (but still quite large) abortion providers expired. Promptly, our taxpayer dollars started flowing into the coffers of the nation’s largest abortion mills.
Planned Parenthood is still the single largest provider of abortions in the United States. According to the organization’s own numbers, it provided 434,450 abortions in 2025 (up 8 percent from the year before). Given that the Guttmacher Institute estimated some 1.1 million total abortions in the United States for the same year, Planned Parenthood is responsible for nearly half of the children killed in their mothers’ wombs that year.
To be sure, it’s not that taxpayers are directly paying for abortions (thanks to the Hyde Amendment). What the Big Beautiful Bill had done was simply prevent these abortion mills from billing Medicaid for non-abortion-related procedures (like mammograms, contraception, and STD screenings), given their murderous activities. Planned Parenthood has been struggling financially for a while and depended on the $800 million it was receiving from the federal government for those services to stay in business and keep offering abortions.
All things considered, the last year of defunding the organization was fairly helpful in forcing Planned Parenthood to shut down clinics. The organization cited the Big Beautiful Bill as the reason it had to close some 30 of its approximately 600 clinics in the last year. According to one spokeswoman, the organization even had to pause abortions for a month in Wisconsin and eventually changed its status (a bit of a loophole) so that it could continue getting reimbursed by the government.
That’s good news, but it’s bittersweet given that Planned Parenthood is back to blithely calling on the federal government to send it our money once again so that it can continue killing a large portion of yet another generation of Americans.
So why didn’t we just extend the relevant part of last year’s bill? It comes down to the weak knees that Republicans in office tend to develop in the months leading up to the midterms. The fact is, they’re afraid of losing the upcoming elections (even though everyone knows such an outcome is likely given historical realities), and they don’t want to do anything that might threaten their chances. Permanently defunding Planned Parenthood, as good as it would be for the country, is not something they’re interested in right now.
Ironically, as Kelsey Pritchard of SBA Pro-Life America told EWTN News, renewing the defunding of Planned Parenthood would actually be “the politically smart thing for Republicans who must energize the base to win in November.”
And look, defunding Planned Parenthood and other large abortion providers is merely a small part of the pro-life agenda. It’s a single step (and a small one) toward saving the lives of the innocent unborn children continually being murdered in this country. But if we can’t permanently defund the organization murdering almost half a million babies, how do we expect to pass far more effective legislation to do things like ban mifepristone?
READ MORE from Aubrey Harris:
The King Is the Defender of ‘the Space for Faith.’ Here’s Why That Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone.
Socialism Just Had a Shocking Come Back. We Need a Better Response
As America’s 250th Birthday Approaches, Let’s Talk About Patriotism
