President Donald Trump privately signed a bill today allowing states to withhold federal funds from groups that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood, CNN reports.
The bill reverses an Obama-era regulation to shield such organizations from abortion-related cuts on the grounds that they provide many other medical and family-planning services. Planned Parenthood says that 3 percent of its services are abortions, and its more prevalent services include cancer screening and treatment for sexually transmitted infections.
Defunding Planned Parenthood would disproportionately affect low-income women and girls. As Francie Diepreported in 2015, more than one in three women who received contraceptives from a publicly funded clinic, which offers at least some patients free or reduced-price care, did so at a Planned Parenthood in 2010. Publicly funded clinics averted 1.7 million unplanned pregnancies that same year, the Guttmacher Institute found.
In a poll released by Quinnipiac University in January, 62 percent of Americans opposed denying federal funding to Planned Parenthood.
