COLUMBIA, Mo. – Republican gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. attorney Catherine Hanaway started a weeks-long RV tour across the state to push new anti-abortion reforms.
“The most important thing we’re doing on this tour is win support for proposals that will enhance our protections for unborn children,” Hanaway said at a press conference in Columbia, the third stop on her tour. “The first thing Missouri must do is end all funding for Planned Parenthood.”
While conservative members of the General Assembly have also called for the state to defund the embattled reproductive health organization, Gov. Jay Nixon has refused to join states like Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama. Some of those efforts, however, have been overruled in federal court.
Hanaway does not agree with the court’s decisions to continue to use Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood.
“You do not have to have Planned Parenthood be a provider for Medicaid,” she said. “The federal courts probably will continue to litigate this issue for some time to come, but I would rather have Missouri be on the side of fighting for providing that women’s health money to places that don’t provide abortion.”
The former Speaker noted that other health centers that do not perform abortions could use the funding. She used a map showing 588 other health clinics around the state in Missouri, compared to the relatively minuscule 13 Planned Parenthood clinics in the state.
“Shifting money from PP to these health centers actually makes healthcare more accessible to women.” she said. Hanaway further explained that these clinics could take on the extra influx of patients that use Planned Parenthood’s services.
“They’re well dispersed throughout Missouri, and they are very much grassroots health care organizations that are providing great care and all kinds of care, except abortion,” Hanaway said.
Hanaway also criticized the investigation by Attorney General Chris Koster, the likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee, which cleared Planned Parenthood of all wrongdoing, saying that it was nowhere near extensive enough.
“When I was U.S. attorney, I worked with the FBI, the DEA, Secret Service agents, and postal inspectors,” she noted. “Not one of those agents would have limited an investigation to a one-month time period and taking the word of one executive of one institution that’s in that business.”
Hanaway also called on Missouri to join other states, which have passed “pain-capable” abortion bans, which usually bans abortions when a fetus can allegedly feel pain at a gestational age of 20 weeks. However, that number is still up for debate by the American Congress of Obsetrics and Gynecologists.
