Anti-Choice GOP Doubles Budget for 'Witch-Hunt' Panel

In yet another sign that the war on women will ramp up under a Republican-controlled Congress and Trump administration, the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday doubled the budget for an anti-choice subcommittee that reproductive rights advocates have denounced as a “taxpayer-funded witch hunt.”

With a vote largely along party lines, the House approved an additional $800,000 for the so-called “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives,” created last October to look into fetal tissue research in the wake of 2015’s video smear campaign by anti-abortion activists that purported to show Planned Parenthood officials admitting to selling fetal body parts. In January, a grand jury empaneled to investigate those charges indicted the anti-abortion activists for fraud instead.

According to The Hill:

Women’s rights groups, healthcare professionals, and Democratic lawmakers have called for the subcommittee to be shut down; on Thursday they reiterated those calls.

“Republicans are wasting no time in pursuing their promise to roll back women’s health care,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) added in a statement. “The panel has already endangered doctors’ lives and life-saving research. Studies and clinical trials on diseases and conditions like multiple sclerosis that impact millions of Americans have been delayed or halted. And panel Republicans have released the names of doctors knowing that doing so threatens their safety.”