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Surprise! Planned Parenthood CEO Top Advisor on Contraception Mandate

By Katie Pavlich

Guess who was a key player in pushing through the birth control mandate in ObamaCare? Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards. According to reports, not only did Obama listen to Richards, but took her word over the suggestions his top advisers, including Vice President Joe Biden, then Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. According thABC's Jake Tapper, there was an internal debate about the contraception mandate at the White House.

The debate within the White House on this issue was, sources say, heated, and President Obama was legitimately torn. Panetta wasn’t alone in his concerns. For months, Vice President Joe Biden and then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley argued internally against the rule, sources tell ABC News. Biden and Daley didn’t think the rule was right on either the policy or the politics, sources said. Joshua Dubois, head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, also expressed concern.

The policy was wrong, the two Catholic men, Biden and Daley, argued, saying that the Obama administration couldn’t force religious charities to pay for something they think is a sin.

But Biden and Daley faced a strong group making the case for the rule within the administration – including Catholics such as senior adviser David Plouffe and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, senior White House advisers Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse, and then-domestic policy council director Melody Barnes. Others outside the White House also pushed hard for the rule, including former White House communications director Anita Dunn, Senators Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards. (Some of the details of this internal division were first reported yesterday by Bloomberg’s Mike Dorning and Margaret Talev.)

LifeNews makes this point:

Note that liberal feminists and the abortion lobby carried more sway with Obama than his higher ranking male advisers. Recall Barnes is a former Planned Parenthood Action Fund and EMILY’s List board member and also a former lobbyist for the Center for Reproductive Rights. We all know how tied into the abortion industry Sebelius is. Obama has surrounded himself with radical pro-abortion feminists.

Comforting to know the President of the United States is taking his advice from people who believe in Planned Parenthood, an organization founded to "Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit."