Joe Biden is rapidly becoming the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history as he takes multiple actions to expand abortions and force taxpayers to subsidize them.
On Wednesday, the Biden administration released a rule that will force taxpayers to fund the abortion industry through the Title X family planning program.
The rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will end a pro-life regulation that President Donald Trump put in place to ensure Title X grants are not used to subsidize the killing of unborn babies in abortions.
Because of Trump’s action, Planned Parenthood and other abortion groups left the program, choosing to prioritize abortions over actual health care. Planned Parenthood, a major recipient of Title X funds prior to Trump’s rule, was defunded of about $60 million.
“From day one, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have worked to pay back the abortion lobby that spent millions to elect them,” Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser responded in a statement. “President Trump’s Protect Life Rule respected both the plain statutory language of Title X and the strong majority of Americans who oppose using taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion on demand. Abortion is not ‘family planning’ and Biden-Harris Democrats pursue this extreme, unpopular agenda at their political peril.”
Title X funds are not supposed to be used for abortions. The program provides family planning services to low-income individuals, and the law states that Title X grants may not be used “where abortion is a method of family planning.”
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Though the language is clear, the AP reports: “Abortion rights supporters and opponents have argued back and forth over decades, through Democratic and Republican administrations, whether counseling a patient about abortion or referring a patient to a different provider for an abortion violates that language.”
Trump’s rule made it even more clear that Title X recipients cannot refer women for abortions or provide abortions, thus ensuring tax dollars are not used to support the killing of unborn babies.
But Biden’s rule will allow abortion providers to begin receiving the funding again and allow them to refer Title X patients for abortions.
The rule must go through a public comment period and final review before it can be enforced.
Last week, Biden also proposed a $340 million (18.7 percent) funding increase for the Title X program in his federal budget.
HHS, under the new leadership of pro-abortion Secretary Xavier Becerra, claimed Trump’s rule “has been devastating to the hundreds of thousands of Title X clients who have lost access to critical family planning and related preventive health services,” according to Kaiser Health News.
Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said they plan to rejoin the program as soon as the new rule goes into effect.
“As the nation’s only federal program dedicated to providing affordable birth control and other reproductive health care to people with low incomes, Title X is a critical piece of our social safety net that can, and should, help ensure equitable access to essential health care,” she said in a statement.
But others warned that the program will be used to pad the already billion-dollar abortion industry’s bottom line and support killing more unborn babies.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie, policy advisor for The Catholic Association, told LifeNews that the newly proposed rule would undo important, life-saving progress in America.
“The newly proposed Title X rule fails to recognize that abortion has never been an accepted method of family planning” Christie said. “[It] would result in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars being once again funneled to abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood, when polls consistently show that U.S. taxpayers do not want to underwrite this life-ending procedure.”
Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, expressed similar concerns to NPR, saying abortion groups could use the money to encourage women to consider abortion.
“The agency that is getting the Title X funding can refer for abortion and tell [women], ‘Oh and by the way, we do abortions in this same facility if you want to set up the appointment,’” Tobias said.
The Trump administration rule, the subject of a current U.S. Supreme Court case, prohibits Planned Parenthood and other abortion businesses from receiving Title X tax dollars unless they completely separate their abortion businesses from their taxpayer-funded services. That mean housing their family planning services in separate buildings with separate staff from their abortion businesses. It also prohibits referrals for elective abortions.
A recent Marist poll found that, by a double-digit margin, a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion (54 percent to 39 percent).
