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EXCLUSIVE: A coalition of pro-life groups, including Lila Rose’s Live Action, Students for Life, CatholicVote and others, is urging the Senate to take urgent action to enact a decade-long ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers before a July 4 deadline.
Senate Republicans hope to nail down the first step of their party-line funding package for immigration operations this week.
The current prohibition on federal tax dollar funding for abortion businesses, which President Donald Trump signed as part of last year’s budget bill, is set to expire this Independence Day. With the deadline fast approaching and congressional majorities subject to change this November, the groups stressed in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune that the lives of unborn children — and hundreds of millions in annual tax dollars — are at stake.
In their letter to Thune, the pro-life leaders wrote that extending the prohibition is a matter of urgent fiscal responsibility, saying the “financial stakes are significant” and that a 10-year extension “would represent one of the most meaningful pro-taxpayer reforms Congress can enact.”
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., teed up a key test vote on a funding package to avert a partial government shutdown as Democratic resistance threatens to thrust Washington, D.C. into chaos. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Before the big, beautiful bill’s provision took effect, Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion business in America, received nearly $800 million annually in taxpayer funding, primarily through federal health programs.
The letter asserts that “at a time of historic federal debt and growing budgetary pressure, continuing to subsidize the abortion industry is neither fiscally responsible nor defensible.”
Though federal law bans taxpayer money from covering most abortions, many Republicans have long argued that abortion businesses such as Planned Parenthood use Medicaid money for other health services to subsidize abortion. Under the tax provision in Trump’s 2025 spending bill, Medicaid payments are barred from going to abortion businesses, including Planned Parenthood.
The letter states that this prohibition “reflected longstanding concerns that many of the nation’s largest abortion businesses engage in activities that extend beyond traditional healthcare services.”
These services, the letter says, include “providing and promoting abortion as a core organizational activity,” offering or referring for gender transition interventions, including for minors, and delivering sex education programs that “promote inappropriate content to minors while denying parents meaningful transparency.”
The letter states that the budget reconciliation process “remains the appropriate and proven legislative vehicle to achieve this objective” and that “defunding provisions fall squarely within reconciliation’s fiscal and policy scope.”
“As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of American independence,” the pro-life leaders argue that “Congress has an obligation to ensure that federal spending reflects fiscal discipline, accountability, and respect for life.”
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Activists opposing funding for Planned Parenthood demonstrate in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, via Getty)
They further framed a ten-year extension as consistent with longstanding bipartisan precedent separating abortion from federal spending. Such an extension, the letter says, would also “provide long-term policy stability, protect taxpayers, and prevent future administrations from restoring funding through executive action alone.”
In response, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood shared a statement in which the organization slammed Republicans for including a provision to make the prohibition permanent in a 2026 reconciliation package framework released by the Republican Study Committee.
Planned Parenthood has said that 23 of its health clinics have been forced to close due to Trump’s spending bill. More than 50 clinics closed in 18 states last year, with most located in the Midwest.
The organization called the 2025 budget bill’s bar on federal dollars for abortion businesses “unconstitutional,” adding that the closure of its locations has left “thousands of patients with fewer options, higher costs, and less freedom to make their own decisions about their lives, bodies, and futures.”
Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that “any member of Congress who supports this proposal is choosing to sacrifice our health care system and Planned Parenthood health center patients who already struggle to get care, just so they can score points for their anti-abortion agenda,” adding that “people’s ability to get the health care they need is on the line.”
“President Trump and his backers in Congress have already caused irreparable harm when they passed a law ‘defunding’ Planned Parenthood,” said Johnson, concluding that “Planned Parenthood Action Fund will never stop fighting to protect everyone’s access to sexual and reproductive healthcare.”
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Left: Live Action President and founder Lila Rose. Right: Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill-Johnson (Live Action; Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images; Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Rose emphasized in a statement to Digital that “if Congress does not act, the abortion industry will once again have access to hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.”
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“This letter makes clear why that cannot be allowed to happen,” wrote Rose, adding, “Planned Parenthood’s core business is abortion. It exists to kill preborn children for profit. It has also become a major promoter of gender ideology, including puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for minors.”
“The Senate should use reconciliation again and enact the strongest defunding measure possible under the law,” she added. “American taxpayers should never be forced to subsidize an industry that distributes cross sex hormones to vulnerable kids and kills millions of preborn American babies through abortion every year.”
In addition to Rose, the letter was signed by Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins, Catholic Vote President Kelsey Reinhardt, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser and 34 other pro-life leaders from across the country.
