“Planned Parenthood is a trusted health care provider that millions of women rely on for reproductive health care of all kinds, including birth control, potentially life-saving screenings for cancer, screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections including HIV/AIDS, and abortion services. With more than 700 health centers, Planned Parenthood provides quality, affordable health care to 2.7 million women each year, including countless low-income women. Planned Parenthood also provides educational programs to 1.5 million people each year.

The rush by extremists in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood — based on misleading and heavily edited videos designed to deceive the public — is grossly irresponsible. If it succeeds, it would cause irreparable harm to women’s health and leave millions of women with no access to the health care they need.

Before these videos were released, the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee had already voted to defund the nation’s family planning program, and the Senate Appropriations Committee had voted to gut its budget — so there can be no pretense that leaders in Congress care about women’s health. The efforts to defund Planned Parenthood would cause even more harm, and they are as callous and politically motivated as they are unpopular. Closing clinics and denying women health services are not what the nation wants.

The fanatics who produced and are disseminating these misleading videos have been discredited in the past, and deserve to be discredited again. Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation program helps advance life-saving medical research — and fetal tissue research has helped produce treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases.

The shameful spectacle in Congress should end. The harassment by the anti-choice fanatics who produced these videos deserves to be condemned. Congress should focus on improving women’s health by making comprehensive reproductive health services available to all women.”