A Republican bid to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood has failed in the Senate. The vote was 53 to 46, seven votes short of the 60 needed to advance the defunding bill. The bid came after an anti-choice group released secretly recorded, highly edited videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing how they share fetal tissue with researchers, a practice Planned Parenthood says is performed legally and never for profit. Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono was among those to defend Planned Parenthood.

Sen. Mazie Hirono: “Indiana at one point defunded Planned Parenthood. In one of the counties, Scott County, that Planned Parenthood clinic performed most of the STD examinations. That county is in the midst of an HIV crisis. So they had to actually put up a pop-up clinic to deal with that crisis and to provide those services that had previously been performed by the Planned Parenthood entity in that county.”