The massive omnibus spending bill released early Wednesday morning could funnel millions to the abortion lobby, pro-life lawmakers and conservatives warned The Daily Wire.
“This is the most radically pro-abortion administration in history,” Republican Indiana Rep. Jim Banks told The Daily Wire on Wednesday afternoon. “Biden’s omni will potentially send millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, which the vast majority of Americans oppose.”
Banks said that the worst part of the bill is the “massive windfall” it gives to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and to its pro-abortion secretary, Xavier Becerra.
“Secretary Becerra is an anti-life radical who supports partial birth abortion,” Banks said. “His budget increased by nearly 10%, and he’ll use that money to pursue his anti-life agenda.”
The Daily Wire reported Wednesday morning that Republicans had grave concerns about the spending bill — an internal Republican Study Committee messaging document shows that the massive figures included in the bill were kept secret until the bill’s early morning release, noting that conservative lawmakers felt deprived of a voice in the negotiating process.
The spending bill includes $575 million for “family planning” internationally, Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy pointed out, $286 million for Title X funding to “keep the lights on at Planned Parenthood, $32.5 million for the pro-abortion U.N. Population Fund, and $200 million for a brand new “Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund” to help promote abortion across the globe.
“House Democrats are reminding us that they are religiously pro-abortion, and that they want to export their extremism everywhere,” Roy told The Daily Wire.
“Of course, this is just political payback for the abortion industry at taxpayer expense,” he added. “The American people need to say ‘enough’ and stop funding violent tyranny over the lives of the unborn.”
Funneling millions to the abortion industry through the massive spending bill is a “typical Washington trick,” according to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
“I think it’s awful, funneling any public funds to the abortion industry is not something Congress should be doing,” Roberts said in a Wednesday afternoon phone interview.
“I would really like to encourage our conservative lawmakers to remember that in spite of whatever else is in that omnibus that they like, the far more important thing for them to do is to protect women and to protect the unborn, and it’s what their constituents expect,” he said.
“I can tell you, this is one of the worst examples of DC,” the Heritage Foundation president added, warning that “the amount of corruption” and “lack of transparency” exhibited in the spending bill is “egregious” and should make conservative lawmakers dig deeper into the legislation before voting on it.
Conservative organizations also emphasized that the bill has many avenues through which it can fund the abortion lobby.
In a letter obtained by The Daily Wire, the Family Research Council’s Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs Travis Weber begs lawmakers to oppose the spending bill and warns that it will score against the bill (HR 2471) “or any legislative vehicle” containing the same provisions.
“The omnibus bill contains a problematic reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that undermines the bill’s very purpose and harms the battered women that VAWA is intended to help,” the FRC letter said.
“It also turns a program designed to help women succeed financially around the globe into a ‘Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund,'” Weber continued. “This new program, backed by previous commitments by the Biden Administration to promote gender ideology around the world, will open the door wide for this administration to push a harmful ideology in places like Eastern Europe at a time when safety and security should be the primary goal.”
This Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund program would “pave the way” for the international abortion industry to promote abortion as necessary for women, Weber warned.
The spending bill would give massive sums of money to the organization Education Cannot Wait, a global education initiative hosted by the UN Children’s Fund that promotes access to contraception and abortion as well as ideological gender and sex education, according to a memo from the Center for Family and Human Rights.
Education Cannot Wait asserted in a 2018-2021 Gender Strategy document that “sexual and reproductive health interventions” are vital to preventing pregnancy and continued education, the memo said.
To date, according to the memo, the United States has contributed over $92 million to this organization.