Former President Donald Trump has done more for the anti-abortion movement, and by extension, women and babies, than any of his predecessors. His nomination of justices who adhere to the Constitution to the Supreme Court alone helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a travesty imposed on the nation that resulted in 63 million children being killed by abortion.
But the role of the federal government is far from over.
To those Republicans who are saying, “Abortion is now strictly a state issue,” while I might disagree, I want to take you at your word. If you truly mean there is no federal role in abortion, then we need to make the federal government abortion neutral.
Start by eliminating the illegal moves by the Biden-Harris administration related to abortion. In October 2022, the Department of Defense announced that, despite the statutory prohibition of using military funds for abortion, the Pentagon would transport service members to obtain abortions and use funds so its doctors could obtain licenses to perform abortions. The executive branch has also violated federal law by turning government hospitals for veterans and their families into clinics that provide abortions.
The current Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is forcing employers, including those who are anti-abortion, to accommodate their employees’ abortions, even when unlawful under state law or against the conscience of the employer. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act is a federal law governing provisions of care in emergency rooms around the country. The Biden-Harris administration is using it to force emergency rooms to provide abortions in violation of state laws.
Those are some of the executive actions taken by President Joe Biden, which could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by any new administration. However, that wouldn’t address the billions of federal tax dollars that go toward the abortion industry.
In August 2022, the Biden-Harris administration sent letters, ignoring federal laws, to the states encouraging them to apply for waivers to use federal funds to “expand access” to abortion. A month later, the administration followed that up with a Department of Justice memo that wrongly reinterpreted the Hyde Amendment, a yearly appropriations rider that blocks federal funding from going toward abortion, stating the almost 50-year-old rider should be ignored and federal tax dollars can and should be used to fund abortion, especially abortion travel. Around the same time, the Department of Health and Human Services reopened the human fetal tissue market, restarting grants that had been stopped by the Trump administration. The baby parts industry makes millions of dollars for groups such as abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
A White House fact sheet on the 51st anniversary of Roe identified the $263 million HHS awarded to Title X clinics in 2022 as an action taken by the Biden-Harris administration since Roe was overturned “to defend reproductive rights.” The administration went a step further by cutting off Oklahoma and Tennessee’s Title X funding mid-grant solely because the states will not counsel or refer for abortions illegal under state law. Particularly egregious, the termination came shortly after HHS determined that Tennessee’s Health Department was “the only agency in the state capable of administering Title X funds with integrity.”
To the Biden-Harris administration, integrity means little if you do not proclaim fealty to killing children in the womb.
In 2021, Biden’s Food and Drug Administration allowed mifepristone to be prescribed to a woman without her ever having seen a doctor and then shipped to her by mail or picked up at a pharmacy. This occurrence not only further endangered the health of the women who took this death drug, but it also allowed predators to access the pill if they wanted. It has led to 100,000 additional abortions per year during the Biden-Harris administration. Mailing abortion drugs violates federal law, which broadly prohibits mailing and using any common carrier to transport any drug, medicine, or other article used or intended to produce abortion. The law needs to be enforced.
Even if you reversed all that the Biden-Harris administration has done to promote and pay for abortion, the path to federal neutrality would be barely halfway through. Since 1973, the government, meaning taxpayers, has been the biggest supporter of abortion. A Government Accountability Office study revealed that nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer funding has been funneled to big abortion providers between 2019 and 2021. That means over the last 52 years we have all subsidized, and in some cases paid directly, for the murder of over 63 million unborn children.
Abortion groups don’t just use this money to abort children. The government dollars allow groups such as Planned Parenthood to spend millions of dollars to defeat anti-abortion Republicans and on court cases blocking states from passing anti-abortion laws.
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If you genuinely believe the abortion problem is strictly up to the states, we must reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s pro-abortion moves, enforce current laws that protect women and children, and stop the taxpayer spigot from subsidizing and paying for abortions. The federal government must stop supporting abortion and instead support life.
Tom McClusky is the director of government affairs for CatholicVote, where he represents family, freedom, and faith interests on Capitol Hill.