The day before the annual March for Life in Washington, House Republicans gave more substance to the cause by passing a bill to boost pregnancy resource centers.
On a party-line ballot, 214 Republicans outvoted 208 Democrats to pass H.R. 6918, the Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Women and Families Act, by Rep. Michele Fischbach (R-MN). The bill would block President Joe Biden’s administration from rule-making that would keep states from using welfare funds for the resource centers.
The opposition by Biden and the Democrats to pregnancy resource centers is bizarre, radical, and unconscionable. Those centers provide important goods and services such as diapers, prenatal vitamins, parenting classes, transportation, and health-care counseling to expectant mothers. Yet because they do not promote abortions, the national Democratic Party has engaged in a virtual jihad against them. The Biden-Democratic position essentially is that nothing counts as pregnancy-related care unless it encourages serious consideration of abortion.
Democrats, therefore, support federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. Thus, organizations get money through other programs not generally associated with welfare to help mothers stop being mothers, but, under the Biden rule, organizations would not get money to help mothers prepare for healthy childbirth.
Seriously, that’s the Biden position. It is also the unanimous position of House Democrats.
This isn’t about mere differences in interpreting the legal meaning of a statute — this is about the Biden administration making a deliberate choice to change a law’s long-existing, accepted meaning.
The main program, generally known as “welfare,” has been known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families since July 1, 1997. TANF sends money in block grants to states to help families combat childhood economic and social disadvantage. TANF funds cannot be used for direct healthcare, which is covered by other federal programs, but the law gives states broad discretion to use the money for family-support efforts, including the complementary goals, citing the Congressional Research Service, of “reduc[ing] the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and promot[ing] the formation and maintenance of two-parent families [my emphasis added].”
For years, states have been free to use funds for pregnancy resource centers on the quite reasonable assumption that the provision of prenatal services helps make it easier for two-parent families to form and survive. The Biden team, though, citing only the goal of reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies without any reference to the “two-parent family” goal, proposes a rule stating that “programs that only or primarily provide pregnancy counseling to women only after they become pregnant likely do not meet” eligibility requirements for TANF “because the connection to preventing and reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies is tenuous or non-existent.”
In other words, the Democrats’ thesis is that it’s OK to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies by terminating pregnancies but not by encouraging family formation. From an ethical angle, this is terrible. From a legal angle, do they not understand the meaning of the word “and?” The statute connects the two purposes with “and” because they are supposed to work together in service of the overarching purpose of TANF, which explicitly is devoted to serving poor “families,” not to stopping the creation of families in the first place.
In response to Biden’s outrageously skewed proposal for a new rule governing TANF, Republicans pushed through Fischbach’s bill over united Democratic opposition. Now, unfortunately, the bill must go to the Senate, where a Democratic majority along with a possible filibuster await, likely dooming it unless Senate Democrats experience a renewal of what once would have been considered basic human conscience.
Despite all the media representations of Republicans as being extreme on abortion, it is the national Democratic Party that has lost its perspective and collective mind on the subject. A year ago this month, in what I consider the single most morally monstrous vote in the history of Congress, 210 out of 211 Democrats in the House voted against a bill that would require medical care for the rare, but not negligible, cases in which a baby outside the womb survives an attempted abortion.
Read that again: Democrats refused to require medical care for a baby actually born alive, breathing air on its own. This isn’t just abortion up until the very moment of birth on the grounds that the child is part of “a woman’s body.” This is murder by deliberate negligence after the child has been born. Yet all but one House Democrat refused to ban deliberate infanticide.
And now every House Democrat has voted to restrict funds for prenatal care, too. Every. Single. Democrat. What is wrong with these people? Why don’t they want to help babies be born?
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There is a vast difference between wanting some or most abortions to be legal and, on the other hand, treating abortion as a desirable outcome while discouraging healthy pregnancies altogether. Today’s House Democrats take the second approach. In no moral universe is this acceptable.
To keep TANF working as it has been for the past 27 years, to promote decent prenatal care, the Senate should reject Biden’s inexcusable position and pass the Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Women and Families Act, forthwith — rather than smothering the bill in its cradle.