The Biden administration is growing increasingly hostile toward unborn babies and the many people who defend their lives.
On Monday, pro-life leaders warned that President Joe Biden’s proposed changes to the Title X family planning program are another sign of “government hostility towards people of faith,” The Christian Post reports.
Denise Harle, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, said Christian doctors and other pro-life medical professionals could be forced to refer patients for abortions through the program, according to the report.
“The current Title X rules ensure that taxpayer dollars don’t fund programs promoting abortion, but the revised Title X rule compromises healthcare professionals’ freedom of conscience by requiring Title X participants to refer patients for abortion and contraceptives,” Harle said during a press conference hosted by the pro-life Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“The revised rule targets everyone who believes abortion is not birth control and imposes a one-size-fits-all method of family planning on the public,” she continued.
Biden’s new rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in April, will end a pro-life regulation that President Donald Trump put in place to ensure Title X grants are not used to subsidize the killing of unborn babies in abortions.
Planned Parenthood and other abortion groups left the program after Trump issued the rule, choosing to prioritize abortions over actual health care. Planned Parenthood was defunded of about $60 million.
EPPC senior fellow Roger Severino, the former director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights, said Biden’s changes “would coerce participants into referring for abortion,” the Post report continues.
Severino described the new rule as a “favor to the abortion industry and big abortion.”
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
The rule is not in effect yet. A 30-day comment period concluded Monday, and the rule must go through final review before the Biden administration can implement it. Once that happens, however, Harle warned that pro-life family planning providers will be kicked out of the program and the abortion industry will take over.
“The revised rule would force religious family planning providers out of the program because they can’t in good conscience abide by the government mandates,” she said.
Harle said the new rule shows the Biden administration’s “hostility towards people of faith,” according to the report.
“Title X should not be used to punish people of faith, and government programs certainly shouldn’t be used in a revenue stream for the abortion industry,” she said.
Valerie Huber, a former official in the HHS Office of Global Affairs, also participated in the conference. She pointed out that Biden’s rule also gets rid of requirements that Title X providers give minor patients “practical ways … to discuss family planning with their parents,” according to the report. She said the new rule also ends requirements that encourage “couples to communicate about and to share in family planning decisions together, and provide minors with counsel on how to avoid sexual coercion.”
Title X funds are not supposed to be used for abortions. The program provides family planning services to low-income individuals, and the law states that Title X grants may not be used “where abortion is a method of family planning.”
Though the language is clear, the AP reports: “Abortion rights supporters and opponents have argued back and forth over decades, through Democratic and Republican administrations, whether counseling a patient about abortion or referring a patient to a different provider for an abortion violates that language.”
Trump’s rule made it even more clear that Title X recipients cannot refer women for abortions or provide abortions, thus ensuring tax dollars are not used to support the killing of unborn babies.
But Biden’s rule will allow abortion providers to begin receiving the funding again and allow them to refer patients who they see through the program for abortions.
Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said they plan to rejoin the program as soon as the new rule goes into effect.
A recent Marist poll found that, by a double-digit margin, a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion (54 percent to 39 percent).
