House Speaker Mike Johnson, perhaps best known for his extremely bizarre comments flaunting how he and his son mutually monitor each other’s porn consumption, is at it again. In remarks to the anti-abortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America on Tuesday, Johnson pledged to defund Planned Parenthood with what President Trump calls “one big, beautiful bill.”
That bill is a broader budget bill encompassing Trump’s entire domestic agenda and is expected to slash as much as $163 billion for, well, basically every useful thing in society. Per HuffPost, which first reported on Johnson’s comments on Thursday, this marks the first time a GOP congressional leader has explicitly articulated a plan to end federal funding for the reproductive health organization that serves millions of low-income patients across the country.
“In the weeks ahead, the House is gonna be working on the one big, beautiful bill,” Johnson said. “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.” I would like to make clear that “big abortion” is a derogatory, manipulative term the anti-abortion movement uses to describe abortion providers, attempting to frame them as a massive, evil corporation, when… ironically enough, a “massive, evil corporation” would accurately describe anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which are the “qualified health centers” Johnson’s referring to.
Also, Title X funding (unfortunately!) can’t be used for abortions under federal law. So, slashing federal dollars for Planned Parenthood and other family planning providers just guts access to a range of other health services, like contraception, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for STIs, and more. In 2013, then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) defunded Planned Parenthood in his state—and by 2015, there was a massive HIV outbreak across a county that was left without access to a sexual health provider.
Johnson further claimed there are “over 2,700 pregnancy resource centers,” or CPCs, that are “helping more and more women choose life.” He continued, “I’m so grateful that SBA and the [anti-abortion organization] Charlotte Lozier Institute have been so instrumental in raising awareness about these important centers, which provide comprehensive care for the vulnerable. And, you know what, they outnumber big abortion providers 15-to-1, so that’s something we can celebrate.”
As a refresher, CPCs are the disinformation-peddling facilities that exist solely to prey on people seeking abortion, usually by posing as abortion clinics and lying to these individuals to convince them to not have abortions. In the process, they effectively mine people’s private medical data and sometimes stalk and harass them for weeks to pressure them against abortion. Watchdog organizations warn that CPCs, many of which fall under the umbrella of one larger anti-abortion organization known as Heartbeat International, “play a central role in surveillance of pregnant people in such a vigilante system” and are “the ultimate movement building tool of the anti-abortion movement.” Since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, CPCs have received hundreds of millions more in state funding in states that ban abortion, like Texas and Florida. (Texas allocated $5 million for crisis pregnancy centers in 2005; by 2024, that number ballooned to $140 million, and the legislature just advanced a budget bill to increase that to $210 million for the next fiscal year.) Johnson has now made clear that he’s determined to redirect funding for reproductive health organizations like Planned Parenthood in order to give even more to these anti-abortion propaganda centers.
Johnson’s speech comes just a month after the Trump administration froze over $65 million in Title X grants for Planned Parenthood affiliates and other reproductive care providers across the country, claiming these organizations promote “DEI” and should be punished for serving undocumented immigrant patients. HuffPost reports that in the month since this Title X funding was slashed, at least six out of 600 Planned Parenthood health centers across the country have been forced to close.
Low-income and rural patients, especially, rely on Title X-funded clinics—not just for lifesaving sexual and reproductive health care, but for the full range of health care in general. About 60% of Title X patients say their Title X clinic is their only source of health care. As Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill-Johnson has stressed, withholding Title X grants inevitably threatens lives: “We know what happens when health care providers cannot use Title X funding: People across the country suffer, cancers go undetected, access to birth control is severely reduced, and the nation’s STI crisis worsens,” she said in a statement last month about frozen Title X grants.
On top of all of this, the conservative Supreme Court is slated to rule on a key case brought forth by South Carolina to determine if states can exclude Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs. If the Supreme Court sides with South Carolina—which is also joined by the Trump administration in its case—this could cost Planned Parenthood nearly all federal funding.
“Nineteen million Planned Parenthood supporters in all 50 states are prepared to fight like hell to stop this egregious attack on their health care and make clear yet again that patients—not the government—should be in control of their own medical decisions,” McGill-Johnson told HuffPost of Johnson’s speech. “‘Defunding’ Planned Parenthood would be catastrophic to communities, put countless lives at risk and wreak havoc on our public health system.”
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