Opinion: Orange County setback for Lila Rose, anti-Planned Parenthood activist
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Our colleague Paloma Esquivel reports today that a divided Orange County Board of Supervisors, which had suspended a grant of nearly $300,000 to Planned Parenthood for sex education programs, voted to reinstate the funding on the advice of attorneys.
Last Sunday, we reported that some Orange County citizens were perturbed about the funding for Planned Parenthood after seeing videos made by UCLA student Lila Rose, who has posed as a pregnant 13-year-old with a 31-year-old boyfriend.
Tustin businessman Mark Bucher brought the matter to the attention of Supervisor John Moorlach, whose chief of staff told us recently that Moorlach had not realized money from the state’s tobacco settlement fund was being allocated to Planned Parenthood.
Moorlach was one of two supervisors who voted against restoring the funding today.
On her website, Rose has posted videos that appear to show Planned Parenthood staffers telling her to lie about the age of her boyfriend so they didn’t have to report the case to authorities as statutory rape.
In a second vote, this one unanimous, Esquivel reports, the supervisors agreed to have the county Health Care Agency adopt policies requiring tobacco settlement money to be spent on direct health services, not education.
And she writes: ‘In addition to eliminating health education, the new rules say services can’t be provided in the same place where abortions are performed.’
Planned Parenthood exec Jon Dunn told Esquivel: ‘Clearly this is an effort to target Planned Parenthood. It’s much more costly to treat people once they have a symptom than to provide them with the information they need to prevent an infection from occurring.’
-- Robin Abcarian
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