Trump Overrides Obama, Frees States to Cut Funding to Planned Parenthood
The annual March for Life might be the country’s biggest demonstration that gets the least amount of mainstream media, but it’s getting attention where it really matters.
Besides getting a satellite address from President Donald Trump to the march itself on Friday, pro-life leaders got bigger, more substantive news from the Trump administration last week.
And it could cut right to the heart of the unholy alliance between government liberals and the nation’s largest abortion provide.
In a letter released on the very day more than 100,000 pro-life activists demonstrated on the National Mall, according to Fox News, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services rescinded one of the most odious directives of the Barack Obama administration:
HHS would no longer consider states that want to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to be violating federal law.
“We are reinstating flexibility for state Medicaid directors to establish reasonable standards and protect program integrity in their own state programs,” HHS spokeswoman Charmaine Yoest told reporters in a conference call on Friday, according to CNN.
The latest directive overrides an Obama-era HHS rule – issued in the final days of his administration — that individual states could not defund Planned Parenthood without breaking federal law.
The rule required “state and local governments (to) distribute federal funds for services related to contraception, sexually transmitted infections, fertility, pregnancy care and breast and cervical cancer screening to qualified health providers, regardless of whether they also perform abortions,” according to The New York Times.
In short, states could not defund Planned Parenthood because Obama said so.
Well, Obama’s not around to say so anymore – and the new HHS position proves it.
“It’s essential to protect and defend the prohibition of Medicaid coverage from most abortion procedures. … This is part of the Trump administration’s commitment to rolling back regulations the Obama administration put out to radically favor abortion,” said Yoest, the department’s assistant secretary of public affairs at HHS and former president and CEO of Americans United for Life, according to CNN.
“Radically favor” is an understatement for how the Obama administration treated abortion providers. Even Planned Parenthood admitted Obama was unique in American history for his support for abortion.
“President Obama has done more than any president in history for women’s health and rights,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said in 2013. When Planned Parenthood talks about “women’s health” it means abortion.
Now Donald Trump is in the White House and running an administration that radically favors the right to life movement.
Constitutional purists might be uncomfortable with the idea that so important a policy of the country depends on the personality of the individual in the White House, but that’s not the fault of Donald Trump or the pro-life movement. The fault for that lies with the Supreme Court and its benighted idea that its 1973 decision to short-circuit democracy and impose legalized abortion on a country that didn’t not approve of it could somehow stand.
Regardless of whether doctrinaire conservatives fully embrace Trump – and regardless of the pointless argument over whether Trump is really a conservative – the fact is that big outcomes of his presidency so far have had a distinctly conservative bent.
And his nomination of true conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a host of similarly inclined judges to lower courts – proves that Trump understands just how important the judiciary is in modern American government.
It was a twisted Supreme Court decision that gave America legalized abortion. It was an odious Obama administration that tried its best to cement abortion into the national culture by forcing individual states to subsidize the operation’s worst practitioners.
The Trump administration decision announced on Friday is aimed at both.
States’ rights under the federalism embedded in the Constitution’s 10th Amendment are a bedrock of American conservative philosophy, and the latest Trump decision champions the idea.
Trump’s latest move should have conservatives cheering.
Like and share on Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know about this Trump administration decision.
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