Note: Official editorial (not published as Hillyer personal column) of the Washington Examiner:
Pro-life activists now have another reason to be pleased that they gambled that President Trump, despite his personal history as a Lothario, would keep his word and do what he could to restrict abortion.
Trump’s administration on Friday finalized the “ Protect Life Rule” to keep taxpayer dollars from health centers that perform abortions or refer patients to abortionists. The new rule means that if people want to receive Title X family planning funds from the Department of Health and Human Services they must ensure “physical and financial separation of Title X projects and facilities from programs and facilities where abortion is a method of family planning.”
The rule specifies a welcome list of other duties by which recipients of federal monies must live. These include “the reporting of child abuse, child molestation, sexual abuse, rape, incest, intimate partner violence, and human trafficking.” They must also explain how women may obtain contraceptive coverage not offered by employer health plans.
These changes are moral and politically prudent. Decent, fair-minded people recoil at the idea of using money confiscated from taxpayers to provide abortion services to others. The public is riven with disagreements over whether and when abortion should be legal, but a clear majority doesn’t want people to have to pay for it for others. A Marist survey released last month showed that “by a double-digit margin, a majority of all Americans oppose any taxpayer funding of abortion (54 percent to 39 percent).”
Trump undertook to reallocate money from abortion providers to nonabortion “community health centers that provide comprehensive health care to women.” His latest executive action fulfills this campaign promise. As was noted by Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, “the Protect Life Rule does not cut family planning funding by a single dime, and instead re-directs tax dollars” to a growing number of women’s and community health centers that provide reproductive counseling, contraception, and other services…..
[The rest of the editorial is here.]
