Sen. Cory Gardner speaks at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver in June. (Photo by Joey Bunch/The Denver Post)
A U.S. Senate vote to fell short in Washington, D.C., Monday, but Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner was quickly criticized by a group aligned with the abortion and women’s health services provider.
Republicans, including Gardner, got 53 votes out of 100, but they needed 60 to fend off a Democratic filibuster. The procedural vote was the latest twist from secretly recorded videos — — that cast a negative light on Planned Parenthood’s practice of legally harvesting tissue from aborted fetuses for research.
“Senator Cory Gardner should be ashamed of himself for his vote to defund Planned Parenthood,” according to a statement from Cathy Alderman, vice president of Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado.
Gardner didn’t back away.
“This bill would redirect funding for women’s healthcare away from the scandal-plagued Planned Parenthood and towards responsible community health clinics that operate without a political agenda,” he said in response. “Funding for women’s healthcare must actually go to fund women’s healthcare, not to line the coffers of an organization under increased scrutiny for reprehensible, inhumane behavior.”
We haven’t heard the last of this political issue, you can bet. The videos already have stirred up the GOP’s base if social conservatives and the religious right. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — viewed widely as a potential pick for president for whoever wins the GOP nomination — how Americans could get upset about the in Africa, but ignore the videos recorded by the conservative Center for Medical Progress.
Planned Parenthood supporters contend the videos were deceptively edited and compare them to the discredited videos that led to the defunding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, in 2009.
“We saw what happened with ACORN, and it happened so fast and it happened without enough pushback from Democrats, and our goal is to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Heidi Hess, campaign manager for Credo, newspaper. Credo is Planned Parenthood’s largest corporate donor.
In a phone interview, Alderman didn’t sound optimistic that political assaults on the organization would cease before next year’s election. The assaults on abortion would take down a lot of other women’s health programs with it, she said.
“More than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are preventive care, including cancer screenings, birth control and testing,” she said in her prepared statement earlier in the day. “And more than three-fourths of our patients are younger, with lower incomes and have few other options. Sen. Gardner’s actions today disproportionately impact lower-income and rural patients who come to our clinics because there are few alternatives available for them.”
