Donald Trump is expanding his 2017 executive order that built on the nation’s “Mexico City Policy” to cut off more streams of revenue from international organizations providing or promoting abortions overseas.
Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers were prevented from accessing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds. And the proposal to expand the order could lead to even more cuts to their funding.
According to the Catholic News Agency, the proposal expands the Mexico City Policy to include military and government contracts overseas.
Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser praised the Trump administration for “boldly defending life” across the world.
“From day one, they have championed innovative policies to protect unborn children and their mothers, as well as taxpayers,” Dannenfelser said. “This new proposed rule builds on that success, further preventing the big abortion industry from exporting abortion on demand around the world on American taxpayers’ dime.”
President Ronald Reagan’s original Mexico City Policy affected about $600 million in USAID grants. Trump’s expansion of the policy will be global in reach.
The expanded Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy covers nearly $9 billion in U.S. foreign aid under the State Department, USAID, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Defense. This includes, for example, grants to foreign NGOs under international health programs to fight AIDS and infectious diseases, or to provide maternal and child nutrition.
Pro-abortion groups are not pleased. Planned Parenthood tweeted on Monday about the “unprecedented expansion of a harmful policy.”
The expanded rule would “require all groups that receive global health aid contracts to agree not to promote and/or provide elective abortions.” Those that do will not receive taxpayer funds.
When Trump first proposed the rule in 2017, Planned Parenthood warned of an unmitigated disaster with “gaps” in health care coverage in the Third World. But a state department report published earlier this year disputes that idea. They found very few gaps were created and those that were were filled by governments or private donations.
Just eight of the 1,340 groups that received U.S. aid money under the Obama administration refused to comply with Trump’s new pro-life policy, according to the report. An additional 47 sub-awardees also refused to comply, the report found.
“Principled pro-life policies can exist hand and hand with … quality health care,” a Trump administration official told reporters.
The few, limited health care disruptions were due to Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups’ own decision to refuse to comply with the policy. In doing so, they placed the killing of unborn babies in abortions at a higher priority than real, life-saving health care for impoverished women and families across the globe.
If Planned Parenthood wants to save the Third World by killing babies, it can use part of its billion-dollar budget not funded by U.S. taxpayers to do it.
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