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Dear Friend,
The Trump administration has cut off family-planning funds for healthcare clinics that provide abortion—or even refer patients for abortion.
Trump’s outrageous family-planning “gag rule” is an underhanded way of cutting off funds for Planned Parenthood clinics that serve more than four million people per year—just to score political points.
Planned Parenthood has announced it will forgo federal funds and serve low-income families using emergency money—but its resources won’t last forever. That’s why Common Dreams is providing hard-hitting coverage of Trump’s attacks on abortion rights and the gag rule to ensure that it’s repealed once and for all.
The Hyde Amendment already prevents federal funds from supporting abortion care.
Trump’s gag rule ups the ante on that racist policy, denying Title X funds—which are used to provide STI tests, cancer screenings, and birth control—to any clinic that provides abortion. Doctors aren’t even allowed to give patients information about or refer people for abortion care.
The policy presents healthcare clinics with an impossible choice: continue to serve low-income families, but withhold potentially lifesaving information about abortion care and contraception? Or withdraw completely from the Title X program?
Planned Parenthood clinics aren’t taking the bait. They’ll keep serving anyone who needs care, regardless of income, without federal support.
But they’ll need help to fulfill that goal. And not all of the 4,000 clinics that now get Title X funds to provide can afford to do the same.
Common Dreams will keep providing in-depth coverage of how Trump’s gag rule is affecting all healthcare clinics—shining the kind of spotlight needed to get this dangerous policy repealed.
Thank you for all you do,
Kimberly Monaghan
Board Chair
for the whole Common Dreams news team
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