Biden’s ‘religion gag rule,’ funding for abortion orgs evince a loss of moral compass

Prominent liberal Catholics were at the White House earlier this month to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. They flooded social media with photographs of themselves with President Biden, gushing about what an honor it was to meet him.

The gathering came just days after Kamala Harris became the first American vice president to visit an abortion mill. Did any of the notable Catholics (clergy or lay Catholics) raise the subject of the Harris tour?  

In comments to the press after her tour of a Minnesota Planned Parenthood facility, Harris remarked that “attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous, and in many instances, just plain immoral.” Just plain immoral? Let’s be honest: on this issue, the moral compass of the Biden-Harris administration is broken beyond repair. While genuflecting to the abortion industry, it is also working overtime to erase the contributions of faith-based social service organizations. A comparison of two new grant rules makes this crystal clear.

Even before the Supreme Court overruled the 1972 Roe v. Wade abortion decision, the Biden-Harris administrative state was promoting and protecting the abortion industry. One of its first moves was to enact rules to circumvent the longstanding prohibition on the use of Title X family planning funds to pay for abortions.  

With an annual budget of $286.5 million, Title X of the Public Health Service Act empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services “to make grants to and enter into contracts with public or nonprofit private entities to assist in the establishment and operation of voluntary family planning projects which shall offer a broad range of acceptable and effective family planning methods and services (including natural family planning methods, infertility services, and services for adolescents).” Importantly, Section 1008 of Title X states that “None of the funds appropriated under this subchapter shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.”  

The Trump administration had enacted a rule requiring Title X projects to be physically and financially separate from any abortion-related activities the grantee might engage in. There were also prohibitions on abortion referrals or “directed counseling.” Unwilling to comply with the new rule, Planned Parenthood, the largest grant recipient in the country at the time, serving 40 percent of all Title X patients, simply withdrew from the program. It was revealing to see that ending the lives of unborn children was more important to the organization than helping low-income families to plan parenthood.

By November 2021, however, Planned Parenthood was once again eager to partner with the federal government. The organization’s change of heart came after the Biden-Harris administration finalized rules allowing Title X-funded sites and providers to offer family planning services at facilities where abortion services were also offered and lifted the prohibition against steering patients toward abortion. This month, another change affecting federal grant recipients was finalized.

New rules affecting recipients of federal social service grants, jointly issued by nine executive branch agencies, are described as “further advancing President Biden’s call for religious freedom and equity for all.” This noble-sounding goal is undermined by the rules’ presumption that faith-based social service groups discriminate against beneficiaries on the basis of religion.  

For example, the new rules require that faith-based groups separate in time or location any privately-funded explicitly religious activities from activities supported with direct federal financial assistance. The drafters of this “religion gag order,” as it should be called, are either unaware or don’t care that religion is what inspires these organizations to care for their neighbors in the first place. Also, for many of these entities, expressions of faith are inseparable from the services they provide.

So, to sum up, our current administrative state gives the abortion industry favorable treatment while burdening religious social service organizations — and all of this with the strong approval of America’s second Catholic president. 

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project.