Video: Planned Parenthood supporters outside Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen’s office
By Bill Lescohier
Chanting “do not defund!,” area women, and a few men, gathered outside Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen’s (R-11th Dist.) Morristown office on Tuesday to voice support for Planned Parenthood.
Similar demonstrations were organized around the country by Planned Parenthood.
Lauren Cerruto, a volunteer with the organization, said she was concerned with a Republican plan that would completely defund Planned Parenthood as part of its promised repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Activists said they want Frelinghuysen, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, to vote against the proposal.
Frelinghuysen recently maintained that he supports a woman’s right to choose, and Planned Parenthood. But he voted to defund Planned Parenthood in 2015 and again this year, after supporting it in 2007, 2009 and 2011, Cerruto said.
The 12-term congressman has garnered a 100 percent approval rating from the Right to Life movement, and 0 percent from NARAL Pro-Choice America, she said.
One on five women uses Planned Parenthood in her lifetime, according to Tuesday’s activists. Without it, some 2.5 million people will lose access to reproductive health care, and unplanned pregnancies and abortions — at their lowest levels in decades — may rise, they said.
Anti-abortion activists rallied outside Morristown’s Planned Parenthood office last month.
They, too, were part of a nationwide campaign. They said Planned Parenthood performs more than 320,000 abortions annually, although all clinics have been barred from using federal Medicaid money for that purpose since 1976.
–Kevin Coughlin contributed to this report.
Please stop taking away a woman’s right to choose. You state you support women’s rights and yet behind the scenes you vote against us. Planned Parenthood does much more than perform abortions. They provide the means for young people to be proactive in regarding reproduction. To choose abortion is a conversation between the individual and her higher power. That higher power is not the government of the United States.