ROME — The U.S. Bishops’ Conference (USCCB) has censured President Joe Biden for this week’s executive order aimed at streamlining abortion access.
Wednesday’s “executive order facilitating abortion” was “the second such action from President Biden in response to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” the USCCB website noted.
It remains “the policy of my Administration to support women’s access to reproductive healthcare services, including their ability to travel to seek abortion care in States where it is legal,” Biden wrote in his executive order. “I am directing my Administration to take further action to protect access to reproductive healthcare services and to address the crisis facing women’s health and public health more broadly.”
The president said he would harness the HHS as well as “the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other relevant HHS components” to evaluate the effect of access to reproductive health care on maternal health outcomes and other health outcomes.
In response, Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, chairman of the Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, issued a statement Friday calling on the president and all elected officials “to increase support and care to mothers and babies, rather than facilitate the destruction of defenseless, voiceless human beings.”
“Continued promotion of abortion takes lives and irreparably harms vulnerable pregnant mothers, their families, and society,” the archbishop asserts. “It is the wrong direction to take at a moment when we should be working to support women and to build up a culture of life.”