Jeb Bush’s grandpa Prescott Bush, family linked to origins of Planned Parenthood
Jeb Bush may denounce Planned Parenthood videos, but there is a long history between the Bush family and Planned Parenthood.
A 1947 letter sent by Planned Parenthood honorary chairman Margaret Sanger which listed Prescott as the treasurer of that organization in the letterhead. ([PDF].)
In 1950, Prescott Bush narrowly lost an election for a US Senate seat in Connecticut after a columnist revealed his connection to the “Birth Control Society.” (the precursor name for Planned Parenthood)
This haunted the family decates later as a 1991 article published in the Baltimore Sun, titled “What’s behind Bush’s flip-flop on family planning?”:
The year was 1950, and the future president’s father, Prescott Bush, was in a neck-and-neck U.S. Senate race in Connecticut. As the campaign entered its final days, disaster struck: Press reports disclosed that the senior Bush was a supporter of Planned Parenthood, causing an uproar among conservative voters. Prescott Bush lost the election by barely one-tenth of a percent of the vote. By all accounts, the birth-control issue cost him the election.
Jeb Bush is signaling a run for president in 2016
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“My own first awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running for the United States Senate,” George H.W. Bush wrote in the foreword to a 1973 book on the importance of family planning in the developing world.
When he became president in 1989, he continued Reagan’s policy of cutting off US funding to the UN family planning effort—the very program he had championed during the previous decade—and blocking US funding for family planning organizations abroad that provided abortion services or information about abortion. President Bill Clinton lifted these restrictions, but Bush’s eldest son, President George W. Bush, reinstated them.
Mother Jones chronicles Jeb’s role in Florida:
As governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, Jeb Bush cut family planning funding and programs to spread awareness about birth control. In his first year in office, he used his line-item veto power to cut $500,000 for a model teen pregnancy prevention program in South Florida operating out of the local Planned Parenthood office. In 2001, Bush axed more than $300,000 in family planning funding for poor women that had been administered by Planned Parenthood. That same year, according to the St. Petersburg Times, Bush proposed taking $1 million from the state’s $5.7 million family planning funds and redirecting it toward teen “abstinence-only” programs that prohibited instructors from discussing birth control—the same kind of information his father had pushed to make more widely available. Even Republicans were squeamish about a teen chastity program that barred any mention of contraception, and Bush’s proposal was never adopted.
Jeb Bush also signed a law banning the procedure known as partial-birth abortion in the state, approved “Choose Life” specialty license plates, and signed a parental-notification law for minors seeking abortions. In 2003, Bush intervened in the case of a mentally disabled rape victim who had become pregnant, pushing for a court-appointed guardian for the fetus, even though the woman was not seeking an abortion. A court ultimately blocked his request. Later that year, when Bush waded into the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead woman whom the Christian right fought for years to keep alive, he boasted that he was “probably the most pro-life governor in modern times.”
