President Biden's $3.5 trillion "Build Back Better" plan would be more aptly named the Anti-Family Budget Buster. But this bill would do more than just empty the pockets of hardworking American families. Clocking in at roughly 2,300 pages (more than twice the length of Obamacare), this reconciliation package seeks to massively expand taxpayer funding for abortion across America.
Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration are working hard to ensure that this partisan bill will do what a majority of Congress has already refused to do -- eliminate the Hyde Amendment and spend billions of taxpayer dollars on abortion. Unless Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the very few remaining pro-life Democrats in Congress, can convince his colleagues to add in basic Hyde Amendment language (language that has already passed in annual appropriations bills since 1976), this bill would greatly expand funding for abortion across all 50 states, red and blue alike.
The current draft text of the bill includes a new health care program that would provide health coverage in the 12 states that opted not to expand Medicaid as a part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This new program would directly fund abortions in those states -- bypassing the Hyde Amendment, which normally prohibits any funding for abortion through Medicaid in those states. This new program would fund not just abortion procedures, but also transportation to and from abortion facilities. This would mean organizations like Planned Parenthood could use American tax dollars to transport women to get abortions, both within and between states. This feature of the bill is a direct response to pro-life laws being enacted in states like Texas, which recently banned abortion as early as six weeks. In other words, if this bill were to take effect as drafted, the federal government would simply overrun the wishes of states and localities by flying women to states where abortion laws are less restrictive, rendering the laws of pro-life states obsolete.
This bill would also massively expand ACA plans that cover abortion and other various tax subsidies paying for health insurance that includes abortion coverage. It is important to note that our tax dollars are currently already paying for abortions through the ACA. Although some states have opted out of offering abortion coverage on the ACA exchange, billions of dollars in tax subsidies are still being sent to individuals and insurance companies to pay for health plans that cover abortion each year. This bill would expand these subsidies and make them permanent, making it even more likely that the abortion funding provisions in the ACA are here to stay. (To learn which states offer abortion coverage and how much is being spent on abortion plans, check out FRC's resources at obamacareabortion.com.)
Lastly, this bill includes several billion dollars in public health grants that lack pro-life protections. This means that new grants for medical schools, nursing schools, and other graduate medical education can be used to pay for abortions and train our medical professionals to perform abortions. It also includes $50 million for the doula workforce -- including abortion doulas, a new, growing field in the abortion industry that seeks to normalize abortion and treat it like a health care service. There are even research grants that lack pro-life protections, opening up even more funding that could be used for unethical research, such as research that uses aborted fetal tissue.
The latest polling reveals that 58 percent of Americans (and 31 percent of Democrats) oppose taxpayer funding of abortion. Congressional Democrats know that spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds on abortion is unpopular, which is why they are using a closed-door, partisan process to usher in the largest expansion of abortion funding ever. As Congress continues to debate which provisions of Biden's plan to include in the bill's final text, it is imperative to let them know that the hardworking families of America should not be forced to pay for the barbaric practice of abortion.
To read more about taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion businesses, see here: frc.org/hyde
To see how your state is doing on defunding the abortion industry, see here: frc.org/prolifemaps
