Ending federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States, has long been a goal of pro-life groups and their allies in Congress. Back in 2007, a Republican congressman from Indiana named Mike Pence introduced a bill to redirect funding for Planned Parenthood to other organizations that didn’t perform elective abortions. The measure failed in a Democratic Congress, but Pence told me at the time that his amendment had been a “successful failure for the pro-life movement” that laid “the foundation for building an argument for defunding Planned Parenthood in the future.”
Pence argued that his bill was an extension of the principle that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to fund elective abortions—or subsidize the organizations that perform them. In Pence’s view, he was following in the footsteps of President Ronald Reagan: While foreign aid to directly fund elective abortions had been banned by Congress since 1973, it wasn’t until Reagan first implemented the “Mexico City Policy” in 1985 that subsidies were cut off to overseas organizations that perform or promote abortion. While Congress has consistently banned the direct federal funding under Medicaid of almost all abortions with the Hyde Amendment since 1976, Pence said that “we need a domestic Mexico City Policy.”
Nearly two decades later, congressional Republicans are still trying to enact the policy that Pence called for back in 2007. “In the weeks ahead, the House is going to be working on the one big, beautiful bill,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told attendees at an event sponsored by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America on April 29. “We’re absolutely making it clear to everybody that this bill is going to redirect funds away from big abortion and to federally qualified health centers.”
Johnson’s “one big, beautiful bill” was a Trumpian reference to the budget reconciliation process, which includes special rules that allow the Senate to bypass the typical 60-vote hurdle for legislation and pass a reconciliation bill by a simple majority. Republicans tried—and failed—to defund Planned Parenthood via reconciliation the last time they controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2017. Given that history, one might think pro-life groups would feel a little bit like Charlie Brown watching congressional Republicans play the role of Lucy holding the football.
A look back at why Republicans failed to defund Planned Parenthood back in 2017 may shed light on whether they will fail yet again in 2025—especially with such a slimmer and more fractious House majority.
The campaign to defund Planned Parenthood—which receives hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the federal government—picked up a lot of momentum in 2015 after undercover activists released videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the practice of selling the organs of aborted unborn children to biotech companies for research. Even Hillary Clinton, the eventual 2016 Democratic nominee, called the videos “disturbing.” John McCain, the late moderate GOP senator from Arizona, was willing to entertain a government shutdown if necessary to defund Planned Parenthood. “I don’t like a government shutdown. … But this is a clear case of totally improper use of taxpayers’ dollars,” McCain said at the time. “If [Democrats] want to stand before the American people and say that they support this practice of dismembering unborn children, then that’s their privilege.” Congressional Republicans passed a bill via reconciliation that defunded Planned Parenthood, but Democratic President Barack Obama vetoed it in 2016.
As the 2016 GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump pledged to defund Planned Parenthood if elected. In 2017, House Republicans passed a reconciliation bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, that included a provision to defund Planned Parenthood. But the bill to repeal parts of Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood failed by one vote in the Senate in July 2017, and congressional Republicans lacked the will to put forward a reconciliation bill that simply defunded Planned Parenthood.
When congressional Republicans put forward their second reconciliation bill to cut taxes in December 2017, they left out the provision to defund Planned Parenthood because they were worried they needed the votes of two GOP senators who support a right to abortion, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. GOP leaders privately promised pro-life groups they would defund Planned Parenthood in a third reconciliation bill, but then the GOP lost an Alabama Senate special election—and with it the 50th anti-abortion vote in the upper chamber. In a 51-49 GOP Senate with Murkowski and Collins, there was no possibility of defunding Planned Parenthood on an up-or-down vote.
Flash forward to 2025: Senate Republicans hold 53 seats, giving them enough cushion to lose the votes of Collins and Murkowski and still pass a reconciliation bill. And it’s not entirely clear that a provision defunding Planned Parenthood alone would cost Republicans the votes of those two senators. Asked if defunding Planned Parenthood via reconciliation would be a dealbreaker for her, Collins told The Dispatch in the Capitol on Tuesday: “I’m going to wait and see what the whole package is, rather than singling out individual provisions. The only red line that I’ve drawn—it’s a big one—is on Medicaid funding. … I am very concerned about Medicaid cuts.” Murkowski declined to comment.
At the same time, even staunchly pro-life Republican senators stopped short of saying a reconciliation bill must defund Planned Parenthood to get their votes. “This is something we feel very strongly about, that health care should be about health, not about taking life,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford told The Dispatch. “We’re working to be able to get it done. That’s all I’ll say,” Lankford added when asked if his vote was contingent on defunding Planned Parenthood.
“There’s a lot of potential deal-breakers. That one’s pretty important,” Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley told The Dispatch.
While Republicans have more cushion in the Senate than they did in 2017, they now have a much narrower majority in the House. With 220 Republicans and 213 Democrats (and two vacancies) at present, Johnson can only afford three GOP “no” votes and pass a reconciliation bill on a party-line vote. This week, a few moderate Republicans signaled opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood, but they also stopped short of threatening to vote down the whole reconciliation bill over that provision.
“Obviously, Planned Parenthood does provide a lot of services outside of abortion,” Rep. Mike Lawler, who is entertaining a gubernatorial bid in deep-blue New York, told reporters Tuesday while adding that he’d have to learn more about what GOP leaders are proposing. On Thursday, another New York Republican, Rep. Nick LaLota, told The Dispatch: “I don’t think we need to touch Planned Parenthood in this reconciliation bill.” Moderate Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania also told The Dispatch on Thursday he opposed defunding Planned Parenthood.
It’s unclear how many other House Republicans share their objections. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska told The Dispatch he’s fine with redirecting Planned Parenthood funding. “I think a lot of people feel very uncomfortable providing a lot of money to one of the largest abortion providers in the country,” he said, adding that he’d only heard of a couple Republicans who object to defunding Planned Parenthood.
Pro-life groups are optimistic that other House Republicans, even if not staunchly pro-life, are comfortable defunding the organization for other reasons. For example, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina—who has been skittish about abortion politics since the Dobbs decision while simultaneously taking an aggressive turn against transgender rights—told The Dispatch that she supports efforts to redirect Planned Parenthood funds to community health centers. Planned Parenthood has faced criticism for prescribing hormones to minors experiencing gender dysphoria after consultations as brief as 30 minutes. In February, the New York Times published a scathing report documenting substandard care at multiple Planned Parenthood affiliates. “Much of the national [private] funding to affiliates went to legal support, public campaigns to expand abortion access and subsidies for patient navigators who help patients access abortions,” the Times reported.
The first sign of whether House GOP leadership will follow through on Johnson’s pledge for the reconciliation bill to “redirect funds away from big abortion” could come as early as Tuesday, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee marks up its piece of the reconciliation package. Pro-life groups told The Dispatch they were confident that provision would be in the Energy and Commerce committee bill, but Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick cast doubt on those expectations following the last votes of the week in the House on Thursday. Fitzpatrick told The Dispatch he had just spoken to Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie on the House floor, and Fitzpatrick said the committee is “not aware” of any provision to defund Planned Parenthood. A committee spokesman told The Dispatch he couldn’t comment on provisions still under discussion
If the House GOP folds less than two weeks after Johnson promised to defund Planned Parenthood, it would be the latest humiliation for pro–lifers who have been repeatedly demoted in the party of Trump since the Dobbs decision. But it wouldn’t be the most consequential humiliation. The Trump administration is in court defending former President Joe Biden’s rules allowing the abortion pill to be prescribed without an in-person visit to a health care provider and shipped through the mail. And any day now it could announce potential executive orders creating federal subsidies or mandates for in vitro fertilization. The latter policy, without limits on the intentional destruction of human embryos, would greatly undermine the principle that tax dollars shouldn’t be used to fund the destruction of unborn human life.
“I think you have to view these issues together,” Tim Chapman, the president of Advancing American Freedom, the political group founded by Mike Pence, told The Dispatch. “In terms of numbers of unborn lives that are protected, the work that needs to be done on [the abortion pill] mifepristone and the work that needs to be done properly on IVF is astronomically higher” than defunding Planned Parenthood. With that said, according to Chapman, defunding Planned Parenthood is nevertheless “something that Republicans have been promising for a long time. It’s time to deliver on it.”
