Days away from a politically disastrous government shutdown, the House of Representatives passed two abortion-related bills in a move by party leadership to quell conservative hardliners who have threatened to defund Planned Parenthood.



The House voted, largely along party lines, to send the bills to the Senate, where Democrats there have enough votes to block the measures. President Barack Obama, a strong supporter of the women’s health program, has threatened to veto the legislation if it reaches his desk.

Yet emboldened by a series of undercover videos that allege Planned Parenthood profited from the sale of aborted fetal body parts, a claim the organization vehemently denies, Republicans are prepared to battle ahead – some vowing to do so at any cost.

One measure would strip federal funds from Planned Parenthood for one year while Congress investigates the videos’ unsubstantiated claims. The second would add criminal penalties to punish doctors who fail to provide medical care to babies born alive during abortion procedures, which Democrats say is redundant as such an act is punishable under current law.

Before approving the measures on Friday, representatives on both sides of the political divide engaged in a theatrical debate, incorporating gruesome photographs and dramatic testimony to hammer their message.

“Our response as a people and a nation to these horrors shown in these videos is vital to everything those lying out in Arlington cemetery died to save,” said Representative Trent Franks, a Republican from Arizona.

Franks, who sponsored the bill that would punish doctors, delivered his remarks next to a poster showing a burned fetus that had survived an abortion attempt positioned to his left.

“That’s not what this bill does,” said Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat from California. She said there are already laws in place to punish doctors who don’t act to save an infant born alive during an abortion.

Instead, she said, “the real purpose of this bill is to intimidate abortion providers out of practice”.

Several Democrats accused Republicans of leading a “witch-hunt” against Planned Parenthood and said it was a “sideshow” that distracted from the more pressing issue of passing a budget and averting a shutdown.

“I want to say this as respectfully as possible,” Representative Lois Frankel, a Democrat from Florida, said of the bill to defund Planned Parenthood. “This bill is dumb, it’s foolish, and it’s mean-spirited with only one purpose, and that is to punish one of our country’s premier health organizations because it provides women access to an array of services that we need to lead healthy lives.”

Planned Parenthood receives about $500m a year in government funding, mostly through Medicaid reimbursements and grants, none of which can be used to fund abortion services, which represent just a small fraction – 3% – of the services it provides to women nationwide.

Instead, the funds mostly subsidize cancer screenings, contraceptives and other women’s health and family planning services.

In a statement following the votes, Planned Parenthood called the bills a “callous attempt to insert politics into women’s health” and noted that they would almost certainly be stopped in the Senate and, if not, by the president.

“Nothing that politicians in Congress did today will change the fact that our doors remain open to everyone, in every part of this country, who needs high-quality, compassionate reproductive healthcare,” the organization said on Friday.

The videos have angered prominent Republicans and pushed the issue of abortion to the forefront of the presidential race at a time when candidates of both parties are trying to woo female voters.

During Wednesday night’s Republican presidential primary debate, former Hewlett Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina delivered a dramatic attack on the organization and dared the president and Hillary Clinton to watch the videos. Critics, however, noted that Fiorina’s diatribe was misleading as she described gruesome scenes that were not actually shown in the videos.

US senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who are also seeking the Republican nomination, have led campaigns to defund Planned Parenthood, but a vote on the issue in the Senate failed last month.

Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton has defended Planned Parenthood, and called the efforts by congressional Republicans an attack on women’s rights. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who is also seeking the Democratic nomination, has called the action a “long-term smear campaign” to deny women access to the procedure.