House Speaker Tim Armstead’s letter to the state Department of Health and Human Resources asking the agency “to detail any and all state funding it has provided to Planned Parenthood” is not unexpected, given the recent controversy surrounding the non-profit reproductive health care provider and the state’s political power shift to the GOP.
West Virginia, despite being a conservative state, always maintained (until recently) liberal abortion policies, primarily because of Democratic dominance in the Legislature. The GOP seized control of both chambers in the 2014 election and earlier this year, with conservative Democrat support, the Legislature passed the pain-capable bill prohibiting abortions after 20 weeks.
Governor Tomblin vetoed the bill, but Lawmakers overrode that veto, making West Virginia the 11th state to outlaw abortions after 20 weeks.
Abortion foes in West Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the rest of the country have seized on the controversial videos which purport to show Planned Parenthood executives negotiating the sale of aborted fetal tissue for research to build an argument against taxpayer funding for the non-profit. Planned Parenthood segregates its monies so federal dollars do not pay for abortions, in compliance with federal law.
The videos themselves are in dispute. Planned Parenthood hired the research firm Fusion GPS to review them. It determined they had been edited to the point that they had no “evidentiary value” in a strictly legal sense, but that there was no “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”
The only Planned Parenthood clinic in West Virginia is in Vienna, near Parkersburg. It does not perform abortions, but it does make abortion referrals. The clinic does benefit from taxpayer dollars; it’s one of 150 health care centers in the state that share $800,000 for supplies and it received $66,000 in FY 2015 for cervical cancer screening, breast cancer screening, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and family planning services.
Speaker Armstead has been joined by Republican state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in pushing to defund Planned Parenthood. They say the money now going to the Vienna clinic could be spread to other health care providers so there would be no cut in services.
It’s worth noting that while all the focus is on Planned Parenthood, West Virginia is one of only 17 states that funds medically-necessary abortions. The state Supreme Court voted 3-2 in 1993 in West Virginia Women’s Health Center v. Panepinto to require the state to use Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions for poor women.
In 2013, the House of Delegates narrowly rejected along a party line vote a measure that would have restricted the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. However, the House was Democratically controlled at that time.
If the Republicans retain control of the Legislature in 2016, it is likely West Virginia will continue its rapid shift from from one of the least restrictive states on abortion to one of the more restrictive.