Journal Gazette
Hundreds join local rally

July 29, 2015
Hundreds of people rallied Tuesday at the Allen County Courthouse Green, where speakers called for Congress to yank public funding from Planned Parenthood and investigate the nonprofit health care organization.

The demonstration was among dozens of “Women Betrayed” rallies organized across the nation to protest videotaped remarks of Planned Parenthood officials talking about providing aborted fetal organs to medical researchers.

Dr. Christina Francis, a local ob-gyn, accused Planned Parenthood of breaking federal laws restricting abortions and of performing abortions “in order to profit from the sale of human organs. That’s right, I said human – the unborn children who are having their organs parceled out are human beings, and this is undisputed.”

Francis said women who obtain abortions through Planned Parenthood are told their unborn babies are “nothing more than tissue that can be discarded.”

Amanda Banks, vice president of Allen County Right to Life and the wife of state Sen. Jim Banks, R-Columbia City, noted that Indiana’s government no longer funds Planned Parenthood, and she called for other states and the federal government to stop giving the group $500 million a year in public money.

“We owe it to the babies who have lost their lives and the women who have been used to goose their profits,” she said.

Although federal funds cannot generally be used for abortions, GOP senators unveiled a bill Tuesday evening cutting federal aid to Planned Parenthood and directing that money instead to “other eligible entities to provide women’s health care services.” Aides said an initial vote was likely early next week.

At Tuesday’s rally, state Sen. Liz Brown, R-Fort Wayne, said Planned Parenthood is “ruthless, dispassionate, deceitful and distrustful and now even mercenary. They are people who only care about the bottom line.”

She also said, “Providing an abortion, cutting up a baby in order to preserve its organs for research, is not giving women access to health care.”

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