Biden’s Assault on Life

  

Mere days after taking office, President Joe Biden directed his officials at the Department of Health and Human Services to consider rescinding the Trump administration’s Protect Life rule, which requires abortion providers to financially distinguish between abortion and other procedures in order to obtain federal funding from the Title X family-planning program.

As of this week, the administration has finalized the process Biden set in motion in late January, and, beginning in November, abortion groups will no longer be required to separate abortion from the rest of their business in order to qualify for Title X funding.

Under the Trump administration’s policy, Planned Parenthood declined to make the required separation, which meant that the organization forfeited its Title X funds, about $60 million a year. It was a significant pro-life victory, even though $60 million was just a fraction of the group’s annual half a billion in federal funding, most of which comes in the form of Medicaid reimbursements.

Thanks to Biden’s decision to eliminate the rule, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers will be free to return to Title X without making any financial distinction between abortion and other procedures — which means that taxpayers once again will be required to fund the nation’s abortion providers under the guise of “family planning.” This, even though the underlying statute says, “none of the funds appropriated under this title shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.”

On abortion, the Biden presidency has thus far hewed as close to the Planned Parenthood line as possible, little surprise considering that the abortion group campaigned vigorously on his behalf and helped Biden’s transition team fill posts in the incoming administration.

“The first thing we would like to see would be an executive order on day one, within the first 100 days, that demonstrates the administration’s commitment to sexual and reproductive health care,” Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson said around the time of Biden’s inauguration.

On that score, the president and his administrators have certainly delivered, and far beyond the 100 days.

Though pro-abortion activists are celebrating this latest move, polling suggests that most Americans tend not to support federally funded abortion, and a significant number of Democrats and pro-choice voters agree. Of course, this doesn’t deter Biden who, far from governing as a “personally pro-life” politician, is everything pro-abortion activists could have hoped and is enlisting the taxpayers in his woeful cause.