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Planned Parenthood offices across the nation have closed this year at a record rate, according to data compiled by Operation Rescue. At least 24 Planned Parenthood sites have closed in so far in 2013. This number includes 3 surgical abortion clinics, 3 clinics that dispensed abortion pills, and 19 offices that referred for abortions.

“Abortion numbers are down so there is less demand for Planned Parenthood. Couple that with recent scandals involving Planned Parenthood that have resulted increased disapproval of their abortion business and it’s easy to see why these clinics are closing on such a large scale,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “While Planned Parenthood officials like to portray these closings as the end of the world for women, in reality, there are plenty of other competent health care providers who are not in business to sell them abortions that stand at the ready to assist women.”

Operation Rescue documented the stated reasons for many of the closures.

In February, five clinics in New York severed ties with Planned Parenthood rather than include the practice of abortion after the national organization mandated that all affiliates provide abortions in at least one of their facilities.

In Texas, at least one Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Midland has closed due to its inability to meet new health and safety standards for abortion clinics.

Other clinic closed due to the defunding of Planned Parenthood organizations by states, general funding cuts, decline in business, and a lack of physicians willing to do abortions.

Planned Parenthood scandals have taken a public relations toll and have led to efforts to defund the abortion giant. Recently, the Planned Parenthood has been placed under investigation by the Governmental Accounting Office, which is looking into widespread allegations of financial malfeasance.

Other abuse-related problems have been exposed in recent months, including:

• Thirty-one documented medical emergencies requiring emergency transport to hospitals from Planned Parenthood clinics since 2012.
• Ohio Right to Life’s documentation of 42 serious complications to the abortion pill since 2011, 32 of which occurred at Ohio Planned Parenthood clinics.
• The death of abortion patient Tonya Reaves at a Chicago Planned Parenthood clinic, which allowed to hemorrhage for 5½ hours before calling for emergency help.
• Planned Parenthood agreed to pay $4.3 million to settle a federal civil suit charging that it fraudulently billed Medicaid for women’s health services provided by some of its Texas clinics from 2003 to 2009.
• Planned Parenthood of Illinois settled a case of Medicaid fraud committed its medical director, abortionist Caroline Hoke, for $367,000.
• Whistleblower suits filed by former Planned Parenthood employees remain pending in California, Texas, and Iowa that allege massive billing fraud.
• Closure of the entire Planned Parenthood Golden Gate affiliate for financial malfeasance.
• The widespread non-reporting of child sex abuse.
• The webcam abortion pill scam in Iowa that has prompted Federal legislation as well as new laws banning the dangerous practice in at least 11 states. The Iowa Board of Medicine is currently revamping regulations to disallow the process.
• The documentation by Life Dynamics, Inc. that Planned Parenthood specifically targets minority communities, especially African-Americans, for abortion.

In spite of all Planned Parenthood’s scandalous behavior, the abortion-promoting Obama Administration announced last week that it has awarded over $655,000 in taxpayer grants to three Planned Parenthood affiliates to act as “navigators,” assisting the public in subscribing to Obamacare. This has created even greater resistance to Obama’s socialized medicine program among people of faith.

“These ‘navigator’ grants are undoubtedly meant to bolster a struggling Planned Parenthood, and may slow the closures for the time being,” said Newman. “But the reality is that Planned Parenthood is only able to continue its vast abortion enterprise with the aid of tax-payer funds. Yet tax-funded abortions are something the majority of Americans adamantly oppose. An Election Day showdown on the subject is becoming more likely.”

In the meantime, the record number of Planned Parenthood office closures is encouraging to those who work to protect innocent life and end abortion, especially in light of a nationwide trend. So far in 2013, 43 surgical abortion clinics have closed around the country, compared to 24 closures in 2012.

“We will work through legal avenues to make sure this trend of abortion clinic closures continues until there are none left to inflict human misery upon vulnerable women and their children,” said Newman.

A petition started by the American Center for Law and Justice is urging President Barack Obama to make sure foreign aid given to Egypt comes with the condition that Christians are protected from the escalating attacks they are suffering at the hands of Muslim-Brotherhood backed Islamists.

“Seventy churches shouldn’t be burned down throughout Egypt. That’s happening because the military is not yet willing to stand in the way,” Jordan Sekulow, ACLJ executive director, said in a phone interview with The Christian Post on Tuesday.

“Words are not enough. Yes, the United States – when we speak, it’s powerful, but what also makes us powerful is the amount of funding we provide to the world and I think this is one of the opportunities we have to at least give this Muslim majority population and military, which we’ve had a pretty good relationship with, the opportunity to do the right thing.”

The U.S. government sends a substantial amount of aid to Egypt every year – close to $1.3 billion, which it says goes into stabilizing the region and helping the decades-long American ally in the Middle East.

With the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, however, and with the current protests following the ousting of president Mohamed Morsi that have led to hundreds of deaths in clashes between activists and government forces, many are questioning the allocation of that aid money.

Following the deadly clashes last week that claimed over 600 lives, the U.S. condemned the actions of the interim government and said that it is halting planned military exercises with Egypt. Reports circled earlier this week claiming that the $1.3 billion annual aid to Egypt has also been cut, but National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said that such stories are “incorrect.”

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“As the president has said, we are reviewing all of our assistance to Egypt. No policy decisions have been made at this point regarding the remaining assistance,” Hayden added.

The ACLJ petition, which has already been signed by over 37,000 people, calls on Obama to comply with human rights requirements and to stand on the side of religious freedom against the Muslim Brotherhood.

“American aid must be conditioned on the protection of Christians, and it must be used to oppose our jihadist enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood,” the petition states, and lists the growing number of attacks against Christians in the North African country.

Christians pray in the Basilica of our Lady of Fatima in Cairo in Cairo August 18, 2013.
(Photo: REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)
Christians pray in the Basilica of our Lady of Fatima in Cairo in Cairo August 18, 2013.

Islamist mobs have burned down a number of churches, monasteries and Christian schools, and there have been reports of Christians who have been killed, as Islamists are turning their anger toward Egypt’s minority Coptic population for backing the protests that brought down Morsi.

Sekulow told CP that one of the main reasons Islamists are targeting Christians is because it gives them a sense of unity.

“On one hand you have the Muslim Brotherhood, who in the past has seen that targeting Christians has unified Muslims. I think that says more about the entire Muslim community than it does just the Muslim Brotherhood, and this gives Muslims that are not part of the Muslim Brotherhood an opportunity to stand up and say ‘No, this will not unite us – in fact, this will divide us.'”

He noted that the Egyptian military is one of the largest in the world, supplied substantially by the U.S., and that it has the ability to defend churches – but that would mean it would have to put its soldiers, many of them Muslims, on the line to defend Christians – something it is unlikely to do without a specific condition on the aid money.

The ACLJ executive director said that the Muslim Brotherhood’s claims that Christians are responsible for the overthrow of Morsi are “absurd.”

“Sure, they were supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood president going down. But they make up at most 10-12 percent of the Egyptian population of 84 million, they are 8 million,” Sekulow said.

“I don’t believe the Muslim Brotherhood wants to acknowledge that it was Muslims that decided they had enough of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Egypt’s Copts found themselves in a similar situation in the 2011 uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak, where scores were killed in attacks by Islamists, and by government forces when they were protesting against those very same attacks.

Sekulow noted that in Egypt, Christians are not really able to defend themselves.

“When Christians fight back and defend church property, and a Muslim gets killed, then the military has shown in the last couple of years that they will roll in tanks into the Christian neighborhoods. The Muslim Brotherhood and their Islamist allies are now arming themselves and they are following a very similar plan to what the Nazis did in Europe, by labeling the homes of Christians.”

The ACLJ petition, he says, seeks to get the U.S. government to create conditions so that Egypt’s government shows that it is ready to protect churches and its minority population from the ongoing human rights abuses.

“A lot of the finances do go toward peace in the region, which historically has been a good country,” Sekulow continued.

“But we supported the overthrow of the leader who was behind that, Hosni Mubarak. It (Mubarak’s reign) wasn’t a great place for Christians, but Christian churches were not regularly being destroyed. It was a sense where the government had shut down or imprisoned the Muslim Brotherhood and made them go underground, though they stayed very much alive and organized – but they knew that if they had done something like that, then that military would crack down.”

Other human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, have also joined the call for the Egyptian government to start protecting Christians from the “unprecedented rise” in violence against them.

“It is a shocking dereliction of duty that security forces failed to prevent these sectarian attacks and protect Coptic Christians,” said Hassiba Hadja Sahraoui, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

“The backlash against Coptic Christians should have been anticipated following the dramatic rise in similar incidents since Mohamed Morsi was ousted. Attacks against Coptic Christians must be investigated and those responsible brought to justice.”

The petition to Obama can be found on ACLJ’s website.

In an upcoming Supreme Court case, the Obama administration is supporting the right of a municipal government to begin their meetings in prayer, even if most of those prayers are specifically Christian.

In Town of Greece vs. Galloway, which the Court will hear in its next term, a small New York town, Town of Greece, was sued by residents for beginning their town council meeting in prayer, arguing that the prayers violated the Constitutional requirement that government may not respect an establishment of religion. A district court sided with Town of Greece, which the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit later overturned.

In an Amicus brief filed this week, the Department of Justice backed Town of Greece in the dispute, arguing that it is that the government does not have the authority to regulate the content of the prayers.

The Supreme Court has previously upheld, the brief notes, prayers at legislative sessions. The Justice Department points out that as far back as the Continental Congress in 1774, chaplains have opened legislative sessions in prayer. The practice continues today in Congress and other legislative bodies across the country.

The Second Circuit declared the Town of Greece prayers unconstitutional, though, because they were mostly Christian prayers, making specific references to Jesus or the Trinity. This type of prayer is not allowed, it argued, because the Supreme Court has said that such government sponsored prayers may not advance a single religious sect.

The Justice Department’s brief argues that the appeals court decision was wrong because it requires the government to police the content of prayers.

“The unbroken history of the offering of prayer in Congress, for example, has included a large majority of Christian prayer-givers and a substantial number of prayers with identifiably sectarian references,” the brief states. “Neither federal courts nor legislative bodies are well suited to police the content of such prayers, and this Court has consistently disapproved of government interference in dictating the substance of prayers.”

Three more local affiliates of the Planned Parenthood abortion business are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding from the federal government to promote Obamacare.

The new grants the HHS department announced today follow one from the Washington, D.C. Obamacare exchange earlier this week.

As Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner reports:

President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced on Thursday that it had made grants totaling about $655,000 to three different branches of abortion provider Planned Parenthood so that the groups could help Americans sign up for health coverage through Obamacare.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said her department had doled out $67 million in grants to 105 different organizations seeking to be “navigators” who will help individuals apply for coverage to be offered starting Oct. 1 through new health insurance exchanges.

Among the grants listed were $295,604 for Planned Parenthood of Montana; $214,427 for Planned Parenthood of the Heartland; and $145,161 for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.

When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, known more commonly as Obamacare, pro-life groups warned that abortion funding would be a component of the health care reform law.

Now, the beginning of that funding is coming to pass as the Obamacare exchange in Washington, D.C. announced this week it is sending $375,000 in taxpayer funds to the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

Obamacare exchanges will operate in all 50 states and a majority of states do not have laws passed that would stop abortion funding or sending taxpayer funds via Obamacare to the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

Enrollment in the exchanges is to begin on October 1, 2013, and the exchanges are to offer health insurance coverage to an estimated 7 million individuals starting on January 1, 2014 (increasing to about 24 million by 2022). Thirty-four states have elected to not set up their own exchanges; therefore, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will operate the exchanges in those states.

Under the ACA, health plans that provide abortion coverage are permitted to participate in the state exchanges. While states are allowed to enact laws “opting out” of permitting insurance plans that cover abortions to participate in their exchanges, many states are unable or unwilling to do so. To date, only 20 states have enacted an opt-out law, citizens.

Americans in states without opt-out laws who are enrolled through an exchange in insurance plans that cover abortion—even if their enrollment is inadvertent or as a consequence of their employment— will be required to pay an “abortion premium” that will be used exclusively to pay for abortions.

Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan D.C. is the abortion business where staffers admitted they handled medications improperly and it also botched an abortion and left part of the baby inside the mother.

From an abortion facility inspection report last year:

“Employee #6 stated, ‘I mix the medications, apply a label and take the vials to the procedure room for the physician to draw up and inject into the patient prior to the procedure. They are used for numbing the cervix.’ Employee #6 was asked who verified the medications she was mixing and she stated, ‘No one.’ While observing the medications being mixed Employee #6 was observed cleaning the tops of the vials prior to the first puncture of each vial. She did not clean the tops prior to the second puncture of the vials. Employee #6 stated, ‘The current research says it doesn’t make any difference. You could lick the tops of the vials and the infection rate would be the same.’”

A Pennsylvania county’s choice to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in spite of the state ban on gay marriage “risks causing serious and limitless harm,” Governor Tom Corbett’s office said in legal filings on Monday.

Attorneys for the state’s Health Department and Gov. Corbett filed a legal claim Monday against D. Bruce Hanes, the register of wills for Montgomery County, who has been illegally distributing marriage licenses to same-sex couples for the past several weeks. Since he began, Hanes has issued 116 same-sex marriage licenses in spite of the state’s 1996 statute defining marriage as being between one man and one woman.

In Monday’s legal filing, Gov. Corbett’s office argued that Hanes is blatantly violating state law, and as a public official he cannot breech a law simply because he personally believes it to be unconstitutional. Rather, the legal brief asserts that it is the responsibility of the courts to determine a law unconstitutional.

“Ours is a government of laws, not one of public officials exercising their will as they believe the law should be or will be,” the legal brief stated, warning that Hanes and other county officials may be guilty of one misdemeanor for each act of breaking the law.

The governor’s legal team also argued in a statement last week that the county’s breach of state law could cause limitless “administrative and legal chaos,” including same-sex couples illegally filing for state benefits. The goal of Corbett’s lawsuit is to have Montgomery County cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

Hanes began issuing the licenses shortly after the state’s attorney general Kathleen Kane stated that she would not be defending the 1996 ban on same-sex marriage in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is seeking to have the state legalize same-sex marriage. Kane, a democrat, said in a press conference that because she felt the 1996 ban to be unconstitutional, she could not ethically defend the law.

Gov. Corbett’s office responded to Kane’s announcement in a similar way it has responded to Hanes’ actions, saying that her choice to not defend state law creates “confusion” in the courts, adding that her failure to defend the state was an “improper usurpation of the role of the courts, which at a minimum, causes confusion among those charged with administering the law.” Corbett’s office has now taken on the responsibility of defending the ban in court; the governor has previously voiced his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Hanes, who controls the distribution of marriage licenses in Montgomery County, has vowed to continue distributing licenses to same-sex couples until he is ordered by the court to stop. He has previously cited the Attorney General’s decision to not defend the gay marriage ban in court as a justification for his actions.

Hanes wrote in an Op-Ed for the Main Line Times that after consulting with his solicitor, Michael Clarke, relying on his own analysis of the law, and following the lead of Kane, he decided to “come down on the right side of history and the law” and issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Lawyers for Montgomery County told the Associated Press Monday that they had just received the governor’s legal brief and were going to review it before responding to the media. The county has until Aug. 19 to file a response.