Pennsylvania Republican Offers Compromise on Planned Parenthood

As the House and Senate return on Tuesday to begin confronting a spending impasse, Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, says he has come up with a way to avert a possible government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding: a bill that would take away money only from clinics involved in selling tissue from aborted fetuses.

That program came under fire after a series of undercover videos surfaced this summer claiming that affiliates of the group profit from it illegally. (Planned Parenthood has denied the charges.) Some Republicans now say they will not vote for a short-term spending measure unless Planned Parenthood is cut off.

Mr. Dent plans to offer a bill similar to the one written by the Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mark S. Kirk of Illinois and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that would only defund those specific clinics — about seven in three states, Mr. Dent said — while leaving the funding in place for the scores of other Planned Parenthood clinics in the country. That bill never got a vote in the Senate, which instead took up and rejected a measure to take all federal funding from Planned Parenthood, and a similar measure is expected on the House floor this week.

Mr. Dent’s bill — which has some Republican support but no Democrats yet — would also require a 90-day investigation by the attorney general and tweaks to language in the current law that would make it even more difficult for health care workers to change the way they perform abortions to help extract tissues for sale.

“This measure that I am proposing with some colleagues is much more targeted and measured,” Mr. Dent said. “We focus the review on where the activity occurred. There are going to be some on the right who only want total defunding of Planned Parenthood and some on the left who don’t want to deal with this issue at all, but I think this is something both sides can look at.”