CLOSE The Senate was deadlocked at 50 on a procedural vote to bring legislation to cut Planned Parenthood to the floor. Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote. USA TODAY 
 
 A Planned Parenthood supporter attends Rep. Jason Chaffetz's town hall meeting at Brighton High School in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, on Feb. 9, 2017. (Photo: Rick Bowmer, AP) 
 
 WASHINGTON — Vice President Pence cast a tie-breaking Senate vote Thursday to pass legislation that will allow states to withhold federal funds from Planned Parenthood and other health care providers that perform abortions. 
 
 The measure, which now goes to President Trump for his signature, dismisses an Obama-era rule banning states from denying federal funds to such organizations. 
 
 Pence's vote was needed to break a 50-50 tie. Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska broke with their party, voting against the measure. 
 
 Republicans have said the Obama rule should be overturned to allow states the right to steer funds away from abortion providers, if they choose. 
 
 Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said the measure reverses a rule that "attempted to empower federal bureaucrats in Washington and silence our states." 
 
 Democrats condemned the measure throughout the day, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York calling it "another example of the Republican war on women." 
 
 "It would let states treat women as second-class citizens who don’t deserve the same access to health care as men," he said. 
 
 The House in February had voted 230-188 largely along party lines to reject the rule under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn recently enacted regulations. 
 
 The rule prohibits states from withholding family-planning funding from providers for reasons other than their ability to offer family-planning services. It took effect Jan. 18, two days before President Obama left office. 
 
 Since 2011, 13 states have restricted access to such grants, disrupting or reducing services in several instances. 
 
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 Women’s marches across the country have protested cuts to reproductive health care services. 
 
 Pence, an evangelical Christian, was a leader in efforts to defund Planned Parenthood while serving in Congress and he co-sponsored “personhood” legislation calling for constitutional rights at the moment of fertilization. As governor of Indiana, he signed several anti-abortion bills, including one that banned abortions solely because of genetic abnormalities — legislation that was suspended by a federal judge. 
 
 In January, Pence became the highest-ranking official to appear in person at the annual March for Life demonstration. He told attendees then that the Trump administration would work with Congress to permanently bar taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion providers. 
 
 “Life is winning in America,” he said then, to cheers. “And today is a celebration of the progress that we have made in the cause.” 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2oCUBj3 ||||| Republican legislation letting states deny federal family planning money to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers squeezed narrowly through the Senate Thursday, rescued by an ailing GOP senator who returned to the Capitol after back surgery and a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence. 
 
 
 
 In Congress' latest clash mixing the politics of abortion, women's health and states' rights, Pence cast the decisive vote in a 51-50 roll call. The tally had been tied after two GOP senators, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Maine's Susan Collins, joined Democrats opposing the measure. 
 
 
 
 Senate approval sent the legislation to President Donald Trump, who was expected to sign it. The House voted its consent last month. 
 
 
 
 The bill erases a regulation imposed by former President Barack Obama shortly before he left office that lets states deny family planning funds to organizations only if they are incapable of providing those services. Some states have passed laws in recent years denying the money to groups that provide abortions. 
 
 
 
 Passage gives Republicans and anti-abortion groups a needed victory just six days after the party's highly touted health care overhaul disintegrated in the House due to GOP divisions. Besides erasing much of Obama's 2010 health care law, the failed House bill would have blocked federal funds for Planned Parenthood for a year. 
 
 
 
 There is already a ban on using federal funds for abortion except for rare instances. 
 
 
 
 Democrats assailed the legislation as an attack on women, two months after Trump's inauguration prompted a women's march on Washington that mushroomed into anti-Trump demonstrations around the nation. 
 
 
 
 "While Trumpcare was dealt a significant blow last week, it is clear that the terrible ideas that underpin it live on with Republicans in Congress," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., using a nickname for the failed House health care bill. Murray, among a stream of Democratic women senators who spoke, called the Senate measure "shameful" and "dangerous." 
 
 
 
 Republicans said the measure would give states more freedom to decide how to spend family planning funds. States would be free to divert money now going to groups that provide abortion to other organizations that don't, like community health centers. 
 
 
 
 "It substituted Washington's judgment for the needs of real people," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said of Obama's rule. 
 
 
 
 With Republicans holding 52-48 control of the Senate, the Collins and Murkowski defections could have derailed the bill because Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., has been absent since Feb. 20, when he had spinal surgery. 
 
 
 
 He had a second operation March 15 and has been recuperating in Georgia under doctor's orders. But he got permission to return to Washington for one day, his office said, and he did so using a walker. 
 
 
 
 "We didn't know at the time what it would be but it turned out to be the vice president's tie-breaker," Isakson told reporters after an earlier procedural vote. 
 
 
 
 The federal family planning program was created 1970 and in 2015 served 4 million clients at nearly 4,000 clinics. Most of the money is for providing services like contraceptives, family planning counseling, breast and cervical cancer screening and sexually transmitted disease prevention. It has a $286 million federal budget this year. 
 
 
 
 Most recipients are women, and two-thirds have incomes at or below the federal poverty level, around $12,000 for an individual. Six in 10 say the program's services are their only or most frequent source of health care. 
 
 
 
 Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, mocked Pence. 
 
 
 
 "Mike Pence went from yesterday's forum on empowering women to today leading a group of male politicians in a vote to take away access to birth control and cancer screenings," she said. 
 
 
 
 The Congressional Review Act has lets lawmakers undo regulations enacted in the last months of the Obama administration with a majority vote. Congress has already used the law to eliminate Obama regulations that strengthened protections for streams near coal-mining operations and prevented some people with mental disorders from gun purchases. 
 
 
 
 Under the Constitution, the vice president casts tie breaking votes. Pence broke his first tie on the nomination of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Frank Thorp V 
 
 With just over a week until government funding is set to expire, Senate Democrats blocked a bill that would ban abortions from being conducted on fetuses after 20-weeks of gestation, a time at which supporters of the bill say a fetus can feel pain. 
 
 The motion, which needed 60 votes to advance, failed 54-42. 
 
 The vote was yet another attempt by GOP leadership to allow Republicans to vote on the topic of abortion ahead of what is expected to be a contentious government funding fight. Conservative Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in that chamber, are calling on their colleagues to block any government funding bill which does not strip federal funding of Planned Parenthood. 
 
 Related: Judge Reinstates Arkansas' Planned Parenthood Contract 
 
 Government funding expires at the end of September. 
 
 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, told reporters that he sees that strategy as an “exercise in futility,” simply because Senate Democrats blocked a measure in August that would move federal funds away Planned Parenthood to women’s health clinics that do not provide abortions. 
 
 “We are not going to engage in exercises in futility,” McConnell told reporters last week, “We’ve already voted one time in the Senate to try to defund Planned Parenthood. We knew the President wouldn’t sign such a bill, so it will not succeed.” 
 
 But that hasn’t stopped Cruz, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, from circulating a letter to fellow Republicans asking for them to sign on to his strategy. 
 
 “The American people should no longer be forced to fund the abortion industry; therefore we will oppose any government funding legislation that would authorize or provide federal funds for Planned Parenthood,” the text of the letter, addressed to Sen. McConnell, reads. 
 
 But the letter has faced opposition from fellow Republicans, with Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican from New Hampshire, sending a letter back to Cruz in response, pressing him on how his strategy will result in anything other than a government shutdown. 
 
 “Since we only received 53 votes on the previous vote to redirect money away from Planned Parenthood, what is your strategy to succeed in actually defunding Planned Parenthood?" Ayotte asks Cruz in her letter, "How do we get 60 votes? And if for some reason there were 60 votes, how do we get 67 votes in the Senate to overcome a presidential veto?” 
 
 Related: GOP Focus Turning to Abortion in 2016 Race 
 
 While today’s bill did not address federal funding for Planned Parenthood, supporters say it would have put the United States in line with the majority of the world when it comes to abortion policies. 
 
 The House passed the bill in May by a vote of 242-184, with four Democrats joining the vast majority of Republicans to support the measure. 
 
 “We're one of seven nations in the entire world that allow abortion on demand at 20 weeks, the fifth month of the pregnancy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who is also running for president said on the Senate floor, “I'd like to get us out of that club.” 
 
 But opponents of the bills on both sides of the aisle said the bill amounted to an attack on a woman’s right to choose, and that language included in the bill was too vague when discussing exceptions of the ban for victims of rape and incest. 
 
 “Under this bill, Mr. President, a doctor who performs such an abortion after 20 weeks to prevent grievous physical injury to the pregnant woman would be subject to criminal penalties of up to five years in prison,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said on the Senate floor, “Do we really want to make a criminal out of a physician who is trying to prevent a woman with preeclampsia from suffering damage to her kidneys or liver or having a stroke or seizures?” 
 
 Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, called the vote a “waste of time” in light of the impending expiration of government funding, saying last week that the vote was in an effort to please the pope ahead of his historic visit to the Capitol to address Congress on Thursday. 
 
 “I guess they want to do that before the pope gets here,” Reid said, “But it's not going to change the pope, how he feels about the fact that republicans have ignored poor people in America. It's not going to change the Pope, how he feels about what's happening to our great world that we live in, that we know dealing with climate change.”
– The Senate on Thursday advanced legislation that would allow states to block federal funding to Planned Parenthood, after calling in Vice President Pence to break a tie, Politico reports. First, Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson was called in to the procedural vote, despite the fact that he's recovering from back surgery. He walked in with a walker but did cast his vote, bringing the total to 50-50. Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate, but Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted with Democrats on this issue, forcing Republicans to keep the vote open for just over an hour to get their win, Fox News reports. The legislation would allow states to block funding that's earmarked for family planning, and Collins explained that's why she opposes it: "It’s important to recognize that there is already a bar against using federal funds for abortion and that bar stays in effect. That’s a prohibition that I personally support, but I’m a strong supporter of family planning funds." Now that the procedural vote has passed, the Senate can hold a final vote later Thursday to officially repeal an Obama-era regulation that kept states from blocking Planned Parenthood from receiving funding from Title X family planning grants. The House already voted to reverse the regulation in February, USA Today reports. This is the second time Pence has had to break a tie since becoming VP; the last time a VP had to do it prior to Pence was in 2005, the Washington Post reports.