How Bush family aided Planned Parenthood’s rise

By Around the Web

(Mother Jones) — Like his fellow GOP presidential contenders, Jeb Bush has fiercely condemned Planned Parenthood in the wake of hidden-camera videos purporting to show the nonprofit’s employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue. In addition to pushing for a congressional investigation into the group, he has called on the next president to halt the more than $500 million in annual federal funding that it receives, and to redirect those funds to other women’s health organizations. But lost in the polarized debate over Planned Parenthood is a fact that Bush would likely prefer not to highlight: His family, dating back to his grandfather, was instrumental in launching and securing federal funding for the group.

During the 1940s, when contraception was a controversial and largely taboo topic, Jeb Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was an active supporter of Planned Parenthood, which was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921 as the American Birth Control League. In 1947, Bush served as treasurer of the group’s first national fundraising campaign—a move he would soon come to regret. 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.” (He went on to win a Senate seat two years later.)

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