Jeb Bush on Tuesday called for expanded health care for female veterans, but took fire from Hillary Clinton for going after Planned Parenthood when he said the organization is “not actually doing women’s health issues.”
“They’re involved in something way different than that,” he continued during a town hall event at a Veterans pf Foreign Wars post in Englewood, Colorado.
The Republican presidential candidate has been an outspoken opponent of Planned Parenthood in light of the recent videos that allegedly show officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue, which is a felony.
But Democrats, led by Clinton, pounced on Bush for suggesting that Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide services beyond abortions.
“Jeb is just wrong,” Clinton tweeted quickly after his comment, adding that the organization provides 900,000 cancer screenings and 4.5 million tests for sexually transmitted infections.
Bush quickly responded with a tweet of his own, linking to a Daily Signal story outlining other uses for Planned Parenthood funding.
“PP treatment of unborn has been horrifying. Let’s support quality women’s health programs instead @HillaryClinton,” Bush tweeted.
Bush’s comments come weeks after he drew controversy for saying he’s “not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” a gaffe he made while criticizing Planned Parenthood.
Later that day, he said he “misspoke,” saying he believes there are “countless” community and women’s health centers that need to be “fully funded” but stressed that he was specifically calling to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization, he said, “that was callously participating in the unthinkable practice of selling fetal organs.”
On Tuesday in Colorado, he pointed to women’s health programs that he expanded while serving as governor of Florida, but added, “I, for one, don’t think Planned Parenthood ought to get a penny.”
At the town hall, Bush largely faced questions from the audience about veterans’ issues and immigration. At the end, he was asked to clarify his use of the term “anchor babies” last week and, more recently, his comment Monday in which he referred to “Asian people” who are taking part in birth tourism.
Democrats have been attempting to paint Bush as insensitive at a time when Republicans are trying to expand outreach to minority voters.
Bush said Tuesday he was talking about a narrow “system of fraud where people are bringing pregnant women in to have babies to get birthright citizenship,” referring to, for example, federal investigations of Chinese women who are coming to the United States on tourist visas to have children that automatically become citizens on U.S. soil.
Pointing to his personal life — Bush’s wife is from Mexico and the two of them have three adult children — Bush described himself as “bilingual” and “bicultural.”
“I’m 62 years old. When I was 17 years old, I fell in love with Columba Garnica de Gallo,” he said. “It’s going to be really hard for me to get lectured to by anybody about the politics of immigration.”
He also used the event to go after Donald Trump on immigration policy, reiterating his view that Trump’s proposal to deport people who are here illegally and force Mexico to build a wall are unrealistic and “not practical.”
For his part, Bush supports a pathway to legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants already in the country and a pathway to citizenship for children who were brought into the country when they were young.