The Nightly Show's Larry Wilmore opened his show this Tuesday with a look at the latest attack on Planned Parenthood, and the eighth vote they just took in the Senate to defund the organization over the last eight years.
WILMORE: Another failed attempt to defund Planned Parenthood by the right. This is the eighth vote to defund them in eight years. Two more and they get a free breast exam taken away from a low-income woman.
The latest excuse being used by the right that led to this vote is the set sting videos, as we've discussed here, from The Center for Medical Progress, which, as Wilmore quipped is the “most ironically named group since the ISIS Center for Women's Literacy.
As Wilmore noted, either this right wing group is lying, or Planned Parenthood is about whether they're profiting from fetal tissue donations, and wondered what the motives of each side might be. After showing a mashup of recent reporting on the fact that these donations have been used for research to cure all sorts of diseases, he had a pretty good idea of just which side that might be.
WILMORE: While it seems like the fight over profiting is taking attention away from what these are actually used for, so context really does matter when it comes to Planned Parenthood videos.
Unless of course, you're on Fox “news.” After showing some footage of Juan Williams being steamrolled by his fellow co-hosts on The Five and not being allowed to get a word in edgewise, Wilmore continued.
WILMORE: That's why I'm calling this Planned Parenthood attack for exactly what it is.
It's a Pap Smear Campaign.
It is. I'm sorry, but it is. That's exactly what it is. And in a Pap Smear Campaign people don't care about facts. So these attacks don't seem to be revealing any illegal activity. Instead they're reveling in shaming women, their health practitioners and doctors.
It's as manipulative and infuriating and sadly predictable as that love triangle in Orange is the New Black.
Now the de-funding vote failed last night, but I want to know, how much government funding does Planned Parenthood get anyway?
He went on to discuss the fact that Planned Parenthood gets $528 million from the government and that none of that money is going to the three percent of their business that provides abortion and that the other 97 percent goes to things like contraception, STD testing and cancer screening, and the fact that for many low-income women, Planned Parenthood is the only resource they have for these services.
And of course, all of the GOP presidential candidates were right there with pushing for the de-funding move as well, with Jeb Bush saying he wasn't sure if we needed a half a billion dollars to fund women's health issues at all.
WILMORE: You're right! We need more! We need more than half a billion there. If you get rid of Planned Parenthood, I'm afraid you'll be stranding millions of women without access to health care. So my question is, where will these millions of women go?
Wilmore's staff, which included Nightly Show Contributors Holly Walker, Robin Thede and Mike Yard explained to him why they were going to be just fine while reporting from a Starbuck's bathroom, the New York Subway, and Rand Paul's election headquarters.
