LOS MARGINADOS: BioEdge: Planned Parenthood prepares for defunding after Trump’s election

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BioEdge: Planned Parenthood prepares for defunding after Trump’s election

BioEdge: Planned Parenthood prepares for defunding after Trump’s election
Bioedge

Planned Parenthood prepares for defunding after Trump’s election

by Michael Cook | 12 Nov 2016 | 1 comment

One group which does view Trump Ascendant as an apocalyptic event is Planned Parenthood. During the campaign the President-elect proposed defunding Planned Parenthood, if it continued to offer abortions; he promised to nominate an anti-abortion justice to the Supreme Court; and he promised to repeal Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, which affect access to birth control. The Vice President-elect, Mike Pence, is an implacable foe of Planned Parenthood, and was amongst the first to propose defunding the organization.
Defunding could be catastrophic. In 2014, the organisation received US$528 million in state and federal funding, representing about 40 percent of its annual budget.
When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, “Do you see this as a doomsday scenario for reproductive rights?” she responded tersely, “our doors stay open”. Planned Parenthood has been offering its services for a hundred years and is not about to give up now.
Planned Parenthood’s foes were jubilant. Live Action, a controversial group which released videos about the sale of foetal parts by Planned Parenthood clinics, said that Trump had to honour his promises:

Despite the millions Planned Parenthood and its allies spent to elect a pro-abortion president and Congress, voters roundly rejected the abortion agenda of Hillary Clinton and the abortion industry that backed her campaign. When the abortion lobby pushed for unregulated abortions through all nine months of pregnancy and wanted to force taxpayers to pay for them, the American people pushed back.
Because of the pro-life pledges Donald Trump made during the campaign, there is now a clear path to end the public funding that enables the dismemberment, poisoning, or starving to death of one million innocent children each year.

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/planned-parenthood-prepares-for-defunding-after-trumps-election/12084#sthash.A3ojduBo.dpuf
Bioedge

The shock of this week’s Presidential election in the United States has overshadowed other winners and losers on election night. Big Marijuana was a winner. Four states have legalised recreational marijuana and another four medical marijuana. Assisted suicide was a winner, with voters in Colorado passing a ballot initiative legalising it.

A big loser was the polling industry, which failed to predict Trump’s astonishing victory. This comes after other surprises (ie, failures) in the Brexit debate and the peace accord in Colombia.

And this has made pollsters’ clients suspicious. “A corporate market research project, you don’t know if your polling is shit because there’s no election day,” Dan Wagner, head of Democratic research firm Civis Analytics, told the Wall Street Journal. In politics, “there’s a day where you’re going to find out whether you were right or whether you’re an idiot.”

Since polling has become a weapon in bioethics policy debates on issues like euthanasia, abortion, or stem cell research, perhaps we can feel a bit more justified in our scepticism about polls which purport to show what the public thinks. It would be silly to say that polling is broken, but it certainly needs a good grease-and-oil change.