Life Advocacy Briefing

Question of the Week

WITH SO MUCH RIDING ON PASSAGE of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” reconciling the budget for the coming fiscal year, will hands-sitting “moderate” Republicans end up jeopardizing efforts to get the federal government out of the business of abortion?

So Far, So Good

THE WHITE HOUSE HAS SUBMITTED TO CONGRESS its budget proposal for FY2026, and as reported by Emily Mangiaracina for LifeSiteNews, it proposes “cutting over $6 billion in funding to pro-abortion, so-called ‘family planning’ programs around the world.’”

The proposal submitted in early May notes, writes Ms. Mangiaracina, “that the US is the largest global funder of ‘family planning’ services, which typically promote or provide both contraception and abortion, through liberal NGOs (non-government organizations). The recommended cut of $6.233 billion,” she notes, “seeks to ‘protect life and prevent a pro-abortion agenda from being promoted abroad with taxpayer dollars.’”

Taking a Second Look at RU?

ON QUESTIONING FROM SEN. JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO), the Administration’s nominee for Deputy Secretary of Health & Human Services, James O’Neill, testified, reports Stephen Kokx for LifeSiteNews, “that he backs a safety review of mifepristone [RU-486].

“O’Neill told Hawley that it is the Food & Drug Administration’s policy ‘to ensure that all drugs are safe and effective, and sometimes new data needs a review.’ He also said,” writes Mr. Kokx, “that ‘mifepristone actually has a Risk Evaluation & Mitigation Strategy, meaning it has been designated for a long time as something that needs periodic review of safety data. … The secretary has pledged to do a safety review of mifepristone,’ [Mr.] O’Neill added, referring to Robert F. Kennedy, ‘and I strongly support that review.’ …

“In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham in February,” notes Mr. Kokx, “Kennedy confirmed that Trump has asked him to study the dangers of abortifacient drugs. ‘During the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health did something that was inexcusable, which is to tell doctors and patients not to report injuries, and that’s not a good policy,’ he said,” quoted by LifeSiteNews.

“While being questioned during his Senate confirmation hearing weeks earlier, Kennedy insisted that ‘every abortion is a tragedy’ when pressed on his abortion stance,” reports Mr. Kokx. “He also indicated that it is important to know the ‘adverse effects’ of every drug, including the abortion drug mifepristone.

“‘I agree with Pres. Trump that every abortion is a tragedy. I agree with him that we cannot be a moral nation if we have 1.2 million abortions a year,’ Kennedy, who is generally supportive of legal abortion, replied when questioned by the fervently pro-abortion Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH).”

Trump Defunds UN Depopulation Outfit

THE PROCESS OF DEPRIVING THE U.N.F.P.A. (United Nations Population Fund) of funding by US taxpayers is now complete, reports Steven Mosher in a commentary for LifeSiteNews.

Pres. Trump “in March ordered the defunding of the UN’s chief population control organization,” writes Mr. Mosher, and that has now been fulfilled. “Termination notices for more than 40 abortion, sterilization and contraception promoting projects have been sent,” reports Mr. Mosher, “cutting off some $335 million in funding and saving countless babies.

“But what really has gotten the UNFPA’s goat,” writes Mr. Mosher, “is the Trump Administration’s announcement of May 9 that the UN group is in violation of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. This Amendment, which dates from 1985, states that no US funds may be made available to ‘any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.’

“The UNFPA, which indeed is involved in coercive programs of population control around the world,” writes Mr. Mosher, “will not be eligible for one single penny of US aid over the remainder of the Trump Administration.” And, legally, should not be eligible well beyond the Trump years.

Mr. Mosher notes he is “personally overjoyed by this decision” as “someone who worked with New York Congressman Jack Kemp and Wisconsin Senator Bob Kasten to get the original Kemp-Kasten amendment passed some decades ago. … It was my original research in [Red] China that first brought the brutality of the one-child policy to the attention of the world,” writes Mr. Mosher. “Women who were pregnant without government permission were subjected to an escalating series of threats and punishments – even being arrested and imprisoned – until they submitted to an abortion and subsequent sterilization. It was [Mr. Mosher’s organization’s] later on-the-ground research in China that provided the bulk of the evidence that UNFPA was heavily involved in China’s long-running one-child policy.

“Investigations into the population control programs of other countries, such as VietNam and Peru, proved that the UNFPA was supporting the same kinds of coercive tactics around the globe.”

And Mr. Mosher concludes: “In a world of falling fertility, we do not need a UN population control organization forcing birthrates downward. We never did.” Amen.

Examining the Proposed Budget

Excerpt from May 7, 2025, commentary by Ben Johnson for The Washington Stand

             Pres. Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to end divisive taxpayer-funded programs, and his proposed budget for the next fiscal year proves he is willing to save your money where his mouth is. The President’s budget specifically asks Congress to cut billions of dollars from government programs promoting “radical transgender ideology,” “LGBTQIA+” programs and government “targeting [of] peaceful pro-life protesters” while transferring power back to the states and increasing federal funding for national defense, border security and public safety.

             Pres. Trump detailed his proposed FY2026 budget in a 46-page overview of major discretionary funding changes, revealing a fiscal and ideological break with his Democratic predecessors. In all, Trump would spend $1.69 trillion, including requesting more than $1 trillion in defense spending for the first time in US history to assist in “repelling the invasion of our border” and “to clean up the mess Pres. Trump inherited from the prior Administration.” …

             Pres. Trump’s proposed FY2026 budget slashes or eliminates abortion funding while protecting pro-life advocates’ constitutional rights. Specifically, the budget would cut $6.2 billion from Global Health Programs and Family Planning initiatives. “The US is the largest global contributor to programs that provide so-called family planning services through liberal NGOs [non-government organizations] and have funded abortions. This stands in direct conflict with the President’s action reinstating the ‘Mexico City Policy.’ The budget protects life and prevents a pro-abortion agenda from being promoted abroad with taxpayer dollars.” The President reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, which bars any group that receives taxpayer funding from carrying out or advocating for abortion overseas. …

             The proposed budget also safeguards pro-life advocates’ rights by eliminating $545 million from Biden-Harris Administration policies that charged the FBI with “targeting peaceful pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” as well as erasing “DEI programs.” The budget also reestablishes fairness by cutting $193 million from General Legal Activities at the Justice Dept., prioritizing criminal prosecutions but reducing the budget of the Civil Rights Division, “which the previous administration weaponized against states implementing election integrity measures, local police departments and pro-life Americans.” …

The Hour Has Come to Stand Up to Planned Parenthood

May 8, 2025, commentary by Joshua Arnold for The Washington Stand publication of Family Research Council

             Pro-life forces in Congress have a once-in-a-decade opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood, but the road ahead is far from easy. Before scaling an avalanche of media disapproval, then hurdling a potentially adverse ruling by the Senate parliamentarian*, pro-lifers must first navigate the measure between the forbidding cliffs that are constraining the GOP’s historically narrow House majority. House moderates are making that last task extremely difficult.

             The simmering tension boiled over “in a Tuesday evening closed-door meeting between Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and some moderate Republicans,” NOTUS** reported. However, neither Johnson nor other Members present were willing to discuss what happened in the meeting with them.

             Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said beforehand that he planned to raise the issue in the meeting, arguing that “we need simplicity in this bill.” According to NOTUS’s anonymous sources, Representatives Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Jen Kiggans (R-VA) were also among the Members opposed to cutting Planned Parenthood funding through reconciliation. Kiggans’s office vehemently contested the report, calling it “false.”

             Johnson has publicly promised that the reconciliation bill “is going to redirect funds away from ‘big abortion.’” This is consistent with Pres. Trump’s stated goal of returning abortion policy back to the states.

             Getting the federal government out of the business of setting abortion policy is hard to do while the federal government continues to subsidize the nation’s largest abortion supplier. In 2023 (the latest report available), the Government Accountability Office calculated that, in the three-year span from 2019-2021, Planned Parenthood affiliates received approximately $1.8 billion from the federal government through HHS grants, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP payments, Paycheck Protection Loans and even USAID.

             Yet the effort to excise “big abortion’s” slush fund stands in danger of faltering over intra-party squabbles. This is an appropriate time for Pres. Trump to step in and unite the GOP, argued National Review’s Dan McLaughlin.

             “There’s a time and place in partisan politics for a big-tent approach to letting legislators vote their consciences or their districts (which are often not the same thing), and there’s a time and place for demanding that people stand with the party’s principles and priorities,” he argued. “Even for those Republicans who don’t care all that much about the moral issues, the group is for all intents and purposes an arm of the Democratic Party,” McLaughlin added. “Trump’s second term should send a message that Democratic and progressive groups no longer have a permanent entitlement to taxpayer financing that is immune to the outcomes of elections.”

             This point of partisan expediency should resonate with the policies pursued by the second Trump Administration so far. Defunding Planned Parenthood is no different than canceling DEI grants, pulling university funding over blatant anti-Semitism or shutting the spigots of USAID to leftist NGOs. The point is that leftwing organizations have enjoyed unfair advantage for decades, and they should be de-subsidized.

             At least one moderate Republican understands this. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said he is “not opposed” to defunding Planned Parenthood through reconciliation. “A lot of people in my district don’t like money going to organizations that do abortion – taxpayer money,” he said. “Planned Parenthood is a massive abortion provider,” Bacon added. “They also are very political, so [we’re] giving them taxpayer money, and then they turn around and attack us.”

             If this argument persuades one moderate Republican, it stands a chance of persuading others. …

*Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: The Senate parliamentarian, though not elected, normally exercises tight control over allowable content in such legislation as the massive budget reconciliation bill. Reportedly, in this case, Senate Republicans may be preparing to overrule the gatekeeper.

**“NOTUS is a new Washington publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute” as stated in a Google search.

Didn’t Mankind Reject Nazi Science?

May 9, 2025, BreakPoint commentary by John Stonestreet & Shane Morris

             Should we “optimize” human beings? That was the question Anna Louise Sussman addressed recently in the New York Times, describing a new process that allows fertility services to bring only the healthiest least disease-prone children into the world. Polygenic embryo screening uses AI to find genes with statistical correlations to disorders such as diabetes, autism, heart disease, cancer and schizophrenia.

             The founder of one company that offers this “service” told Sussman her motivation came from watching her own mother lose her vision to a genetic condition. To help others avoid this fate, her company offers parents “a risk profile on each embryo’s propensity for conditions.” In addition to the altruism, she also hopes to change how baby making is done. “Sex is for fun,” this founder said, “and embryo screening [through IVF] is for babies. It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things.”

             “Screening,” of course, will mean that many human individuals conceived through IVF will never be born. As Pascal Emmanuel Gobry wrote on X, each supposedly “optimal” embryo requires the creation and disposal of many supposedly “suboptimal” ones. Once again, the promised disability-free world is only possible by killing people with disabilities.

             Interestingly, Sussman also conceived a child through IVF. Sharing a time-lapse footage of her daughter as an embryo, she wondered aloud in her article about the embryos she discarded. “I previously joked that my daughter was ‘the embryo that went the distance,’” she wrote, “but now it no longer seemed like a joke.”

             One doctor who advocates for this technology admitted that if his parents had had access to it, he would not have been born because of his diabetes. Perhaps that’s why purveyors of polygenic screening tend to “not dwell, publicly at least, on the fact that you cannot eliminate some diseases without eliminating the people who carry them.” Nevertheless, the public, fully conditioned to artificial reproduction technologies, is poised to embrace polygenic screening and baby optimization. According to one survey cited by Sussman, most Americans have no moral objection to using the technology to identify medical issues, and four out of 10 said they were “more likely than not” to use it if doing so could improve their child’s chances of getting into a top college.

             Once again, things begin to look like the plot of movies like Gattaca, in which most citizens are genetically engineered for perfection and the few conceived the “old-fashioned” way are treated as subhuman. As one bioethicist warns in the article, the message parents get from polygenic screening is not only that we can have the better children, but “we should have the best children that we can.” If that means not only selecting against diseases but for enhanced traits like height, intelligence and attractiveness, so be it. Such selection will rapidly become the norm, and failing to screen will rapidly become a moral failure by parents.

             This will happen even if the promises of perfection prove hollow. A doctor quoted by Sussman warned against the “genetic determinism” these services promote in the public imagination. Would-be parents, he said, would learn to obsess over DNA and ignore more critical factors, such as nutrition, education and “a loving and stable family environment.”

             An Oxford professor of genomics described the promise of polygenic screening as unscientific, since so many “genetic” diseases also depend on non-genetic factors. Screening to decide which embryos live is, she said, “about as likely as a coin toss to deliver the outcome desired.” That’s because, as Gobry pointed out, we still do not fully understand the relationship between our genes and who we are. The most “interesting” biological traits are not on/off switches but complex tradeoffs. In fact, selecting against an “undesirable” trait can even increase the likelihood of another.

             Human beings are mysterious symphonies of genes, experiences, choices and habits that work together to produce an irreplaceable, unrepeatable individual.* To imagine that we can control this process, even in a lab with AI screening, denies what we know about ourselves. As David Bentley Hart once warned, optimization is supposed to select the best traits in humanity but actually selects the worst, an attempt to “reach the divine by ceasing to be human, by surpassing the human, by destroying the human.”

             Perhaps why Sussman’s New York Times piece is so uneasy about the future of human reproduction is the present. It’s already abundantly clear that we do not know what it means to be human, which is why we just can’t say “no”** to promises as unscientific as they are immoral.

*Life Advocacy Briefing editor’s note: The “mysterious symphony” that is the human being also includes a soul, which cannot be produced or manipulated in a petri dish.

** Further editor’s note: We fought a world war some 80 years ago to “say ‘no’” to immoral corruption of science in the name of human progress.

Wisdom from the Great Communicator

EXCERPT #5 from Abortion & the Conscience of the Nation, 1983 treatise by then-President Ronald Reagan, published in Human Life Review, then as a hardcover book from Thomas Nelson Publishers

             We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life – the unborn – without diminishing the value of all human life. We saw tragic proof of this truism last year when the Indiana courts allowed the starvation death of “Baby Doe” in Bloomington because the child had Down’s Syndrome.