One year after his election to the presidency, national pro-life leaders are praising Donald Trump for his clarity and leadership in protecting unborn babies and their mothers from abortion.
“President Trump has been the most pro-life president in modern history, slashing the Mexico City Policy shortly after taking office, which sent millions of taxpayer dollars overseas to pay for abortions,” Penny Nance, CEO and President of Concerned Women for America, tells Breitbart News.
Within days after his inauguration, Trump reinstated the “Mexico City Policy,” one that prohibits any non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive U.S. aid from performing and promoting abortion overseas.
In enacting the policy, Trump also expanded it by directing the Secretary of State to ensure the ban on taxpayer funds for overseas abortions is in place across most U.S. global health programs that provide assistance.
Nance lists more of Trump’s pro-life accomplishments:
His nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court is a pro-life appointment that will have ramifications long after President Trump leaves office. He has also stacked the Department of Health & Human Services with pro-life warriors who are already making positive differences for the protection of the unborn. He has picked individuals to advise him who have solid pro-life credentials, such as Vice President Mike Pence and Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway. He has kept – and I will believe will continue to keep – the promises he made to pro-lifers during the campaign of signing into law a ban on 20-week abortions and ultimately defunding Planned Parenthood, with the help of supposedly pro-life Congressmen and women.
The nomination of Gorsuch and other federal judges with pro-life credentials tops the list of many anti-abortion leaders reflecting on the first year of Trump’s presidency. Liberal judicial activism is the primary way in which Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and others in the abortion lobby have blocked pro-life policies. These organizations have challenged many GOP-led state legislatures that have passed laws restricting late-term abortion or ensuring abortion clinics meet the health and safety standards of other outpatient facilities.
While on the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised his base he would fulfill four pro-life promises:
- Nominating pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court
- Signing into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide
- Defunding Planned Parenthood as long as they continue to perform abortions and reallocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women
- Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions
Though Planned Parenthood has yet to have the bulk of its taxpayer funding eliminated, in April Trump signed a resolution that overturned former President Barack Obama’s end-of-tenure rule that forced states to provide family planning grants under Title X to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.
Beyond these promises, however, the president has also encouraged a pro-life culture through some key appointments in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including:
- Religious liberty defender Roger Severino to head HHS’s Office for Civil Rights;
- Former president of Americans United for Life Dr. Charmaine Yoest as assistant secretary of public affairs for HHS; and
- Valerie Huber, a longstanding advocate of value-based sex education, as chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health for HHS.
Last month, Trump also officially reversed the Obama administration’s HHS contraceptive mandate for employers with religious and moral objections. The provision forced most employers to provide free birth control, sterilization procedures, and abortion-inducing drugs to employees through health insurance plans.
Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, has been a member of Trump’s Catholic Advisory Group. He tells Breitbart News the president’s team has followed through with its promise that Trump “would do everything that past pro-life presidents have done, ‘and more,’” and is on course to “put America back on the solid foundation of her founding principles.”
Pavone explains Trump has taken “very measurable and tangible executive actions to advance the rights of the unborn, including the recent revision of the strategic vision of the HHS.”
He observes as well the president’s support for the pro-life provisions in the GOP tax bill, in which the “unborn child … at any stage of development who is carried in the womb” is recognized as eligible for a tax-advantaged 529 college savings plan.
“The continued string of pro-life judges he is nominating for the federal courts, and the excellent pro-life people he is appointing to various posts in the executive branch – there is a very strong set of ‘intangibles’ that the president brings to the pro-life cause in America,” Pavone adds, noting “the most powerful thing he has accomplished for the pro-life movement is that he kept Hillary Clinton out of the White House.”
Kristan Hawkins, President of Students for Life of America, agrees Trump “gets an A for effort” in his work to achieve a pro-life agenda, but does not give the same grade for Congress.
“I can’t say the same thing for the GOP-controlled Congress,” Hawkins tells Breitbart News, observing:
The high point has been the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, but despite the fact that Students for Life and others mobilized young voters with the message that majorities in Congress would mean movement on a pro-life agenda, too little has been done. Whether in a healthcare or tax vote, Planned Parenthood should be defunded and that money redirected to real, full-service care for women and their pre-born children.
Hawkins also points out that while Republicans in Congress have put out a tax reform bill that recognizes the right of parents “to save for a preborn child’s future,” pro-life leaders remain “disappointed that a tax credit for adoption was not included” in the bill.
“Our message to all politicians remains the same: we welcome you to protect life and defund abortion vendors, or we will welcome primary challengers into your races,” she asserts. “We will vote for life.”
Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel at Americans United for Life, summarizes Trump’s first year in office as a pro-life president.
“The Trump Administration has built an impressive list of prolife accomplishments in 2017, month by month,” he tells Breitbart News.
“They have a strong record on nominating constitutionalist judges to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts,” Forsythe continues. “They have a strong record on administrative and executive actions to limit abortion or reverse the pro-abortion policies of the Obama Administration, and they have supported major prolife legislation in Congress. They have been committed, focused, and persistent.”