The House of Representatives voted Friday to place a one-year moratorium on funding for Planned Parenthood. In a mostly party-line vote of 241-187, the Defund Planned Parenthood Act also approves investing another $235 million in Federally Qualified Health Centers in support of women’s health care.

The House also approved the Born-Alive Abortion Survivor’s Act, which would impose criminal penalties of up to five years in prison plus fines on doctors who don’t try to save infants born alive during abortions.

Supporter say the funding moratorium gives Congressional committees the time to properly investigate Planned Parenthood’s abortion practices and other questions raised by a series of “abhorrent” undercover videos depicting the organization’s systematic harvesting and selling of fetal baby body parts for profit.

Democrat Debbie Wasserman Shultz claimed the House effort against Planned Parenthood is all about partisanship and undermining women’s health. “Some of the members are willing to risk women’s lives just to score political points,” she said.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy countered with a question: “In the face of these videos, with all the alternatives women have for health, why would you want to force your constituents to pay for something so evil?”

Republican Marsha Blackburn said, “The discussion today is not about videos or women’s access to health care. It is about our most basic right – the right to life. It is also about doing what taxpayers sent us to Washington, DC, to do. It is about continuing the process to protect our most vulnerable.”

Friday’s House vote to defund Planned Parenthood carried symbolic weight, but it’s likely to have little practical effect on federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Senate Democrats will scuttle any efforts to defund the abortion organization, and even if any such legislation were to pass Capitol Hill, Barack Obama has already made clear he’d veto it.

Complicating matters, Republican leadership on Capitol Hill is bending over backwards to avoid confronting Obama this fall over Planned Parenthood and risking a government shutdown.

However, Genevieve Wood at The Daily Signal argues a confrontation is precisely what’s necessary to keep another $500 million out of the abortion organization’s pockets. “Let’s be clear,” she writes, “there is only one way to truly end federal funding of Planned Parenthood: defunding it in any continuing resolution taken up by Congress.”

It won’t be an easy fight, she says:

But, if willing, the GOP can make the case that taxpayer dollars for such gruesome, immoral and potentially illegal activities should end and end now. They can do so by going on offense and, for once, forcing Senate Democrats and Obama to defend their indefensible position.

Sometimes, regardless of the stakes, you have to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do.

Planned Parenthood responded to today’s vote by blasting the “continued attacks by anti-women’s health extremists” and asking supporters to change their Twitter avatars by adding the outline of a box around the face, and with the words, “Stand with PP.” Pro-life activists, meanwhile, continue to try to call attention to the undercover videos, and to the unborn children unfortunate enough to find themselves in a Planned Parenthood body shop, children who will never stand on this earth with anyone.