Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured an Iowa audience on Friday that the Trump administration is “100-percent pro-life.”
The Epoch Times reports Pompeo, speaking at a sold-out Family Leader Summit in West Des Moines, highlighted the Trump administration’s actions for life and religious freedom across the globe.
“Our founders built our country on a commitment to essential rights, unalienable rights … that come from these amazing documents, our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, and our nation’s foreign policy must be grounded in those central understandings,” Pompeo said.
He said his office has been focused on promoting religious freedom, national security and essential human rights, including the right to life.
“Abortion quite simply isn’t a human right. It takes a human life,” he said.
Among their actions, Pompeo said they worked with 20 countries on a joint statement criticizing the United Nations for pushing a pro-abortion agenda, according to the report. He said Trump also reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, which defunded Planned Parenthood’s international arm of about $100 million. Along with the policy, Pompeo and the Trump Administration created a new enforcement mechanism to ensure that American tax dollars are not being used to pay for abortions with international aid funds.
The secretary of state also noted their work on human rights issues in China, including the persecution of religious minorities and forced abortions and sterilizations.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration sanctioned Communist Chinese leaders based on new reports exposing on-going forced abortions and sterilizations and other horrific human rights abuses against minorities.
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“The United States will not stand idly by as the [Chinese Communist Party] carries out human rights abuses targeting Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang, to include forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, and attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith,” Pompeo said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
Here’s more from the report about his speech Friday:
The administration especially criticized “China’s war on faith,” Pompeo said. Last year in August, Vice-President Mike Pence met with representatives of three religious groups persecuted in China—Christians, practitioners of Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, and Uyghurs and Uyghur Muslims—along with other advocates for religious freedom.
President Donald Trump and U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback met with survivors of religious persecution of different faiths from 17 countries including China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Burma, Sudan, and Cuba.
Trump spent “almost half an hour asking them very personal questions, hearing stories of burned homes and of imprisoned family members, and reaffirming the American commitment to religious freedom,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo is a former Kansas congressman with a strong pro-life record. While serving in the U.S. House, he co-sponsored the Sanctity of Human Life Act which said, “each human life begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, at which time every human has all legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood…”
