COLUMBUS — The Ohio House voted today to send Gov. John Kasich a bill that would cut off the last $1.3 million in funding that the state sends to Planned Parenthood.

The near-party-line vote occurred just as Mr. Kasich, who will sign the bill into law, takes his presidential campaign from moderate New Hampshire to conservative South Carolina.

Republican legislative leaders have dismissed the suggestion that the timing was anything more than a scheduling matter, but his expected signature is already a presidential campaign issue. Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, who’s been endorsed by Planned Parenthood, has challenged him to veto it while pointing out his past signing of other bills seen as restricting access to abortions in Ohio.

House Bill 294 passed by a vote of 59-32, almost solely with the votes of majority Republicans. Rep. Bill Patmon, a Cleveland Democrat and one of the primary sponsors of the bill, supported the bill.

As the vote was announced, several spectators shouted, “Shame! Shame! Shame” before being ushered from the chamber.

“This bill uses Planned Parenthood as the stand-in punching bag for Ohio’s women,” said Rep. Greta Johnson (D., Akron). “By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Ohio House is showing women where they are on the priority list.”

But Rep. Barbara Sears (R., Monclova Township) pointed to a Senate addition to the bill that earmarks $250,000 of the $1.3 million specifically for safe sleep, safe birth spacing, and anti-smoking programs designed to reduce the state’s poor infant mortality rate statistics.

The Senate also added a provision that presumes that pregnant women who show up at the other clinics that receive the money that otherwise would have gone to Planned Parenthood are eligible for health coverage under the state Medicaid program.

“This may be the number-one bill we will do in this General Assembly that will improve women’s health care and access to care,” she said.

Ms. Johnson, however, called that earmarking of existing money a “false bill of goods” to divert attention from the larger picture of access to care at Planned Parenthood clinics.

The bill was introduced last year in the wake of the release of videos that purported to show representatives of Planned Parenthood outside of Ohio discussing fees for research fetal tissue from abortions.

A grand jury in Texas, however, did not find wrongdoing on Planned Parenthood’s part but rather indicted the two people who produced the undercover recordings, accusing them of felony government document tampering.

Mr. Kasich is set to campaign in South Carolina through Friday with the state’s Republican primary ahead on Feb. 20. He will likely have to return to Ohio to sign a paper copy of the bill.

“He is going to sign it. ...,” said spokesman Joe Andrews. “It may happen over the weekend.”

The bulk of the funding involved is federal aid that flows through the Ohio Department of Health to Planned Parenthood clinics for sexually transmitted disease testing, contraception, breast cancer screening, and other health services provided by 28 Planned Parenthood clinics across the state.

Three of those clinics — in Columbus, Cincinnati, and the Cleveland suburb of Bedford Heights — perform abortions, but federal and state law already prohibit the use of taxpayer funds for non-therapeutic abortions.

The $1.3 million that had gone to Planned Parenthood would instead be diverted to other health clinics and pregnancy crisis centers, but opponents of the bill have argued that Planned Parenthood serves minority and low-income communities that are not served by many of those other clinics.

Planned Parenthood clinics and their two state organizations also receive funding from other private sources as well as the federal government that bypass the state and go directly to the clinics. Attempts at the federal level to block that avenue of funding have stalled.

Meanwhile, hearings continued on Wednesday on a pair of bill that would limit the options when it comes to “humane” disposal of fetal tissue from abortions to cremation or burial.

Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.

First Published February 10, 2016, 8:26 p.m.