From National Right to Life’s NRLC News

WASHINGTON – Rolling back protections for women and their unborn babies, pro-abortion President Joe Biden today signed executive orders reversing the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy—often referred to as the Mexico City Policy—and requirements to qualify for Title X funding.

“During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden made it clear that promoting abortion would be a priority in his administration and it would be done at the expense of taxpayers,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “It is not surprising that his first actions are to dismantle both international and domestic protections that have saved countless lives—and put taxpayer money in the pockets of abortionists.”

By signing the executive orders, President Biden is diverting taxpayer funds from organizations that do not perform or promote abortion to organizations that aggressively promote abortions both in the U.S. and around the world.

Today’s executive orders also rejected the Geneva Consensus Declaration (2020) that reaffirmed “the inherent ‘dignity and worth of the human person,’ that ‘every human being has the inherent right to life.’” The Geneva Consensus Declaration also reaffirmed that abortion is not health care and that sovereign nations have the right to protect all innocent human lives by rejecting abortion.

“Taxpayer funds should not be used to subsidize an industry that preys on women and their unborn children,” said Tobias.

Under the Mexico City Policy, which was expanded under the Trump administration to the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy, grantees had to refrain from performing abortions (except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest), or lobbying to legalize abortion, or otherwise promoting abortion as a family-planning method. If a specific organization declined to agree with these conditions, then the same funds were channeled to other organizations that agreed to the contract stipulations. There was, therefore, no overall reduction in funding for family planning programs resulting from the policy.

Under the new Title X regulations, the Biden administration will allow funds to go to organizations that promote and perform abortions here in the U.S. Under the Trump Administration’s Title X rule, abortion facilities could not be housed in the same location where family planning services were delivered. Under President Trump’s administration, the rule also stated that Title X grantees were not to refer for elective abortion. The rule did not cut funding for family planning but ensured that funding went to health facilities that did not perform or promote abortion as family planning.

“The vast majority of Americans oppose using taxpayer funds to pay for abortions,” said Tobias. “These executive orders blatantly disregard the wishes of the American people as shown in poll after poll.”

In a Knights of Columbus/Marist poll released on January 27th, out of 1,173 respondents 58% “oppose using tax dollars to pay for a woman’s abortion.” Of those, 65% of Independents and even 31% of Democrats oppose federal funding of abortion.

An even larger majority of respondents—77% —oppose “using tax dollars to support abortion in other countries” including more than six in ten of those who identify as pro-choice (64%).

In a post-election poll conducted by McLaughlin and Associates, out of 1000 respondents, 64.6% opposed “using tax dollars to pay for abortion.”