NH Executive Council Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood

Pro-lifers are pleased while pro-choicers are outraged by a vote on Aug. 5, of New Hampshire’s Executive Council to defund Planned Parenthood.

The 3-2 vote against a $650,000 state contract with the organization came down along party lines with Republicans Joe Kenney, Chris Sununu, and David Wheeler all voting against it while Democrats Chris Pappas and Colin Van Ostern voted for it. The vote came in the wake of a series of five sting videos by The Center for Medical Progress purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of body parts of aborted fetuses.

Planned Parenthood officials, Democrats, and other liberal organizations have denounced the videos as inaccurate and edited while conservative groups, including New Hampshire Right to Life, which held a Women Betrayed rally in Concord last month, have called the videos horrific and a reason to not fund the organization.

Gov. Maggie Hassan, D-Exeter, denounced the vote stating that Planned Parenthood provided “critical” health services like cancer screenings, birth control and STD testing to women in the state.

“Access to these services is essential to the economic security and vitality of our families, and I am incredibly disappointed in the outcome of today’s vote,” she said in a statement. “The council’s vote to defund Planned Parenthood will hurt the health and economic well-being of thousands of Granite Staters. Moving forward, I will continue to fight to ensure that women and families have access to the important health services that are essential to the economic security and vitality of our families.”

New Hampshire Democratic Party Communications Director Lizzy Price pointed her criticism specifically at Sununu, who is potentially eyeing a 2016 run against Hassan.

“By voting to attack women’s health, Chris Sununu proved that he is more concerned with his own political interests and trying to win a primary for higher office than he is with the health and economic wellbeing of New Hampshire women and families,” she said in a statement.

Jennifer Horn, however, the chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, applauded the Executive Councilors who listened to taxpayers that were incensed by the videos.

“The appalling videos showing Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of human body parts have raised serious and legitimate concerns,” she noted. “Instead of calling for an investigation of Planned Parenthood’s potentially criminal activity, Governor Hassan has turned a blind eye to this controversy and tried to give more taxpayer dollars to this scandal-plagued organization. This isn’t a matter of being pro-choice or pro-life. It’s about ensuring that public dollars are not being given to a company that may be engaged in criminal activity.”

The Democratic presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley also criticized the vote.

In a statement, O’Malley called it “a step backward for women’s health” adding that he stood “firmly against right-wing efforts to roll back women’s health care and take us back to the 1950s.”

Julie McClain, Clinton’s New Hampshire spokeswoman, called it “a disgraceful and transparent decision to sacrifice the health and well-being of Granite State women in the name of an out of touch and out of date ideology.”

Clinton, however, told the New Hampshire Union Leader last week that she found the videos “disturbing” but added that the organization for “more than a century has done a lot of really good work for women.”

This isn’t the first time the New Hampshire Executive Council has voted to defund the organization.

The Executive Council voted to defund the organization at the state level in 2011 but the federal government went around the vote and funded the organization’s contract for services directly. Other defunding bills were put before the Legislature and rejected. The Executive Council voted to restore funding in 2014 retroactively.