Connor Semelsberger is Director of Federal Affairs for Life and Human Dignity. This article appeared on Townhall.com on January 21, 2022.
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to implement a national plan to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. As the calendar turns to 2022, the highly-transmissible Omicron variant is resulting in the highest daily case rates yet. When examining the actions from President Biden’s first year in office, it would seem that his administration has focused less on concrete solutions to tackle COVID-19 and more on promoting abortion in unprecedented ways.
A week after taking office, President Biden redirected taxpayer funds to abortion conglomerates overseas by repealing the Trump administration’s Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy, which had prohibited foreign abortion providers from receiving U.S. aid. Biden also removed the United States from the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a 34-country agreement that declares abortion is not an international human right. Despite the United States having been a founding member of the Declaration, Biden has tried to expunge all memory of U.S. involvement. This action set the tone for Biden’s entire first year, in which he promoted abortion at every opportunity, far surpassing every previous president.
President Biden even inserted abortion funding into seemingly unrelated parts of his legislative agenda. For example, the massive $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package contained nearly $459 billion in appropriations that lacked key protections against abortion funding. Moreover, in Biden’s first budget proposal, he called for the removal of the longstanding Hyde Amendment. This federal policy has prohibited federal taxpayer funds from being used to pay for abortions for 48 years, with strong support from Biden himself when he was a senator. President Biden also lent his support for numerous pro-abortion bills in Congress, including the most radical abortion bill to ever pass through the U.S. House of Representatives, the Abortion on Demand Through Birth Act, known by its euphemistic formal title, the Women’s Health Protection Act.
The Biden administration has been busily nominating officials with proven track records in support of abortion. One would think that, in the midst of a global pandemic, the president would prioritize staffing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with experienced officials who can ably implement policies to mitigate COVID-19. Instead, Biden has chosen abortion zealots. Xavier Becerra, a long-time member of Congress who voted against the federal partial-birth abortion ban, was confirmed as HHS secretary. Rachel Levine, an avid promoter of abortion and pushing gender transition surgeries on kids, is the assistant secretary of health. Even lower-level political appointees like Stephanie Psaki, who worked as a policy analyst at the global abortion promotion group Population Council, have pro-abortion bona fides.
The pro-abortion appointments have not stopped at HHS. From Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of the U.S. State Department, to Seema Nanda, the solicitor at the U.S. Department of Labor, to Susan Rice, serving as the White House lead on domestic policy, the federal government is littered with abortion advocates. The appointments go beyond roles that have a direct influence over abortion policy. Even Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm have long public records supporting abortion. President Biden’s cabinet is arguably the most pro-abortion cabinet in American history, as it is challenging to find a single political appointee that supports any legal restrictions on abortion.
These pro-abortion officials have moved at record speed to implement an abortion regulatory apparatus that makes the Obama administration’s look like child’s play. By April, the Biden administration had already moved to once again allow taxpayer dollars to fund aborted fetal tissue research. After eight months, the Biden administration moved to re-implement an Obama-era abortion secrecy regulation that allows Obamacare insurance policies to obscure which plans cover abortion.
Only nine months into Biden’s presidency, his administration achieved one of its top goals—sending millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to one of his proudest supporters, Planned Parenthood. The Biden administration did this by repealing the Trump administration’s Protect Life Rule, which prohibited active abortion businesses from receiving Title X family planning funds. But the Biden administration didn’t stop there. It also specifically increased access to grants for abortion businesses in Texas in response to the Texas heartbeat law.
Over the past 12 months, while the media has largely focused on President Biden’s vaccine mandates, foreign policy blunders, and attempts to federalize election law, his administration has worked quietly but relentlessly to advance a radical pro-abortion agenda. Although states and courts provide a check to Biden’s abortion extremism, the president still faces pressure from his base and his own vice president to go further. This administration has implemented abortion policies and installed pro-abortion personnel at a record pace. With three years left in this term, Biden is on track to quickly surpass the abortion records that took the Clinton and Obama administrations eight years to achieve.
