The incoming Biden administration is reportedly preparing a “widespread rollback” of many pro-life policies inked during the Trump administration, according to NBC News.
The initiative will likely restore Title X funding to Planned Parenthood, expand abortion providers’ ability to operate abroad using taxpayer funds, eliminate protections for religious employers who do not want to pay for employees’ contraceptives, and could even eliminate the Hyde Amendment, which protects American taxpayers from directly funding abortion, the outlet notes.
Biden is expected to expand abortion rights dramatically within the first 100 days of his presidency.
“Reproductive rights advocates expect Biden to quickly overturn Trump-era rules, like banning federal funds for foreign and national health organizations that promote and provide abortion and giving employers more freedom to deny free contraceptive coverage for their workers,” NBC reported Tuesday.
At issue is the “Mexico City Policy” or, as abortion rights groups refer to it, the “global gag rule,” which prevents non-governmental and aid organizations that operate abroad from receiving grant money to fund abortion services. When President Donald Trump reinstituted the Mexico City Policy early in his term, he cut off a major source of funding for Planned Parenthood’s international arm.
Also at issue is Title X, which, at one point, allowed Planned Parenthood to receive millions in government resources to provide family planning services to low-income populations. Trump updated Title X to cut off any organization providing abortion services alongside family planning, effectively eliminating Planned Parenthood from the program unless it stopped doing abortions. The organization chose, instead, to walk away from the program.
Despite Supreme Court rulings siding with religious employers over Affordable Care Act authors who wanted to force groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraceptives free of charge to their employees in direct conflict with their closely held religious beliefs, Biden has pledged to strengthen such mandates, leaving many Catholic and Christian groups in the line of fire.
DISRN also reports that “Biden has promised to ‘codify’ abortion into federal law in an effort to prevent any potential Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade and combat the increasing number of state policies that seek to protect the life of the unborn” and that “both Biden and Congressional Democrats have also discussed repealing the Hyde Amendment in 2021, which would allow taxpayer dollars to be directly used for aborting children.”
Biden, at one point in time, considered himself a “pro-life Democrat” and even supported the Hyde Amendment in full in the 1990s. As the Democratic party has shifted leftward — and, in many cases, toward an extreme position on abortion, supporting the practice through all nine months of a child’s gestation and up until the moment of birth — Biden has shifted as well, embracing a decidedly pro-abortion position.
As The Daily Wire reported earlier this year, Biden also appointed former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to head his Health and Human Services department, which is its own threat to the pro-life movement. Becerra tried to force pro-life pregnancy centers, which assist pregnant women without offering them the option to abort, to provide women with information on the abortion procedure and refer patients to abortion clinics. The Supreme Court struck down Becerra’s order.
Many of these initiatives will have to clear both houses of Congress, and while the Democrats technically control both the House and Senate, they likely do not have the support necessary in the Senate to enact a full, extreme agenda.