The New Hampshire Executive Council will take up ten family planning contracts on Wednesday, November 8, three of them with known abortion providers.
The Council meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. in the Council chambers on the second floor of the State House in Concord.
The contracts themselves are for non-abortion services. The Equality Center in Concord is on track to receive $179,800; the Lovering Center in Greenland is on the list for $222,896. Those amounts are divided between state and federal funds. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England is set to receive a cool half-million dollars, all of it from New Hampshire general funds.
This is the same Planned Parenthood affiliate that spent $2 million dollars on “public policy” in 2016, and yet is urging the Council to send more money, hashtagging their appeal “#fundPP.”
That $2 million figure is no longer available to the public on PPNNE’s annual report, where that number has been rolled into the “patient services” category, the better to obscure it. Drill down into the contract, though, and there it is: first you go to the Council page, then you find the meeting agenda, then you find the contract listing, then you click on the contract number, then you scroll down to page 646. Thus do we carry out transparency in government.
Note the million dollars for fundraising, too, as PPNNE urges the Councilors to #fundPP lest health care be denied to patients. No reports that fundraising and public policy might take a hit.
Page 644 of the same contract confirms that PPNNE enjoyed more than $22 million in revenue in 2016.
The last time the abortion providers were at the Council table, the contracts were for HIV/AIDS-related programs. Every Councilor but David Wheeler (District 5, R-Milford) voted to award the contracts.
Contact information for each Councilor is available at the Executive Council web page: Joe Kenney in District 1 (R-Union), Andru Volinsky in District 2 (D-Concord), Russell Prescott in District 3 (R-Kingston), Christopher Pappas in District 4 (D-Manchester), and David Wheeler.
Governor Sununu has a contact page as well. He has no vote on the contracts, but the Department of Health and Human Services staff that negotiated the contracts answers to him.
Lest We Forget
- Any public funds – family planning funds, for instance – received by an abortion provider who also provides health care, help to subsidize abortion. Those funds keep the lights on, pay salaries of support staff, and let the organization pay lobbyists to try to keep abortion unregulated.
- Why do PP and its smaller counterparts stake the health care of so many women on abortion, which is supposedly a minuscule part of their business? Because the current business model is working, thanks to timid state officials. For abortion providers to remain government contractors without involving taxpayers in abortion, they would have to stop embedding abortion with health care in such a way that a strike against abortion or abortion funding meant casualties for authentic health care.
- Recall that then-Councilor Chris Sununu, along with Joe Kenney and Dave Wheeler, voted to reject a PP contract in August 2015. At that meeting, Kenney and Sununu both cited the Center for Medical Progress videos as a factor in their vote. Those videos feature PP employees from affiliates elsewhere in the country discussing trafficking in body parts, with a PP medical professional describing her willingness to alter abortion procedures not to provide the best care to women but to extract the most lucrative intact fetal organs.
Leaven for the Loaf 