Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Joe Biden’s taxpayer-funded abortion order is government at its worst
Joe Biden’s taxpayer-funded abortion order is government at its worst
Jan 24, 2026 9:36 PM

Today with one stroke of the pen, President Joe Biden vitiated three unalienable rights. Biden signed a presidential memorandum order forcing U.S. taxpayers, including those with religious objections, to fund abortion-on-demand and abortion advocacy around the world.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan enacted the Mexico City Policy, which excluded foreign non-governmental agencies that “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” from receiving U.S. Agency for International Development funds. President Donald Trump’s Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance policy expanded this to include largesse distributed by “all departments or agencies” of the U.S. government. Biden’s action reverses that policy.

Both Reagan and Trump allowed abortion referrals in the cases of rape, incest, or if the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother. Thus, today’s executive action requires U.S. taxpayers to pay for the promotion of elective abortion, or abortion-on-demand, which most Americans find objectionable – and which traditional Christianity teaches is sinful.

“Funneling U.S. tax dollars to abortion groups overseas is an abhorrent practice that flies in the face of the ‘unity’ Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promised to inspire,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-lifeSusan B. Anthony List.

A new Marist/Knights of Columbus poll released on Wednesday found that 77% of all Americans – including two-thirds of voters who describe themselves as “pro-choice” and 55% of Democrats – oppose taxpayer funding of abortion overseas.

A sizable majority of Americans also oppose taxpayer funding for U.S. abortions (58%), including nearly one-third of Democrats (31%) and two-thirds of independents (65%).

Biden also paved the way for U.S. organizations that perform or refer for abortion to receive Title X funding. The Trump administration denied Planned Parenthood $60 million in taxpayers’ dollars when the nation’s leading abortion provider withdrew from the women’s health program rather than stop performing terminations.

Dannenfelser said the reversal creates “a slush fund” for abortion providers and represents “a payout to the abortion industry that backed [the Biden-Harris] political campaign.”

Whatever the reasoning behind the expansion of elective abortion funding, one must seek it outside of the rationale offered up by the Biden administration. The measure fails on its own logic.

Take the White House “fact sheet” on the memo, which asserts that “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low es” have been “denied access to reproductive health care” – a euphemism for abortion.

In reality, non-Hispanic black women accounted for 33.6% of all U.S. abortions in 2018, although blacks make up only 13.4% of the U.S. population. “In pared with non-Hispanic White women, abortion rates and ratios were 3.4 and 3.0 times higher among non-Hispanic Black women and 1.7 and 1.4 times higher among Hispanic women,” according to the CDC’s 2018 Abortion Surveillance. “Non-Hispanic Black women had the highest abortion rate (21.2 abortions per 1,000 women) and ratio (335 abortions per 1,000 live births).”

The CDC does not measure the e of women who obtain abortions. However, the Guttmacher Institute conducted a groundbreaking study in 2004 investigating the “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions.” It found that 73% of women say they sought an abortion, because they “can’t afford a baby now.”

If this executive action truly sought to redress women’s inability to obtain an abortion on the grounds of race or e, it is a solution in search of a problem. Politicians who wanted to reduce the high rates of abortion or munities’ access to bona fide healthcare would promote economic policies that create prosperity – like limited government and economic opportunity.

Furthermore, it’s unclear why a politician would consider an industry that has decimated the black population a boon rather than a menace. Typically, such an industry would be found guilty of racial discrimination because of its “disparate impact” on minorities – the same standard Biden applies to other industries.

The official explanation also falters when it refers to the Reagan-Trump policy as a “global gag rule.” The most pithy es from a Supreme Court case decided 11 days before Joe Biden was born. The justices ruled in 1942’s Wickard v. Filburn, “It is hardly lack of due process for the [g]overnment to regulate that which it subsidizes.”

Foreign NGOs are free to advocate abortion all they wish – on their own dime. Once American citizens are forced to underwrite their political positions, U.S. citizens have the right to object. And polls suggest campaigning against financing foreign abortions pulsory taxation is a winning issue.

Some government officials have attempted to portray the redistribution of wealth from U.S. citizens to foreign abortion advocates as a coup for human rights. Dr. Anthony Fauci previewed the move last week, telling the World Health Organization that mandatory taxpayer funding of foreign prises one part of President Biden’s mitment to protect women’s health and advance gender equality at home and around the world.”

Forcing U.S. taxpayers to advance abortion around the world violates the purpose of government. Governments exist to secure our unalienable rights. First among these is the right to religious freedom, including the ability to live our lives according to our conscience – particularly the right not to entangle our hard-earned money in the intrinsic evil of abortion.

“The government should never force taxpayers to fund abortions, either here or abroad, but should work to protect the inherent dignity of all persons, born and unborn,” says Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life.

The Founding Fathers said the right to “property” included both the right to life and the right to be free of confiscatory taxation. As the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rightsexplained:

For the founders, property refers not only to physical goods and the fruit of one’s labor but also passes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They assumed, following philosopher John Locke, that the protection of property rights benefits all … Without the ability to maintain control over one’s labor, goods, land, home, and other material possessions, one can neither enjoy individual rights nor can society build mon life.

Biden’s taxpayer-funded abortion order is government at its worst: undemocratic, unconstitutional cronyism that pulsory taxation to crush fundamental rights and harm the most vulnerable.

The Founding Fathers understood that losing sight of the purpose of government, and the Source and substance of our rights, assures that we can build mon life at all.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Acton books distributed to schools by Theological Book Network
The Acton Institute recently donated a number of titles on faith, work, and economics to the Theological Book Network which will distribute them to its partner institutions in what it calls the ‘Majority World’ (‘Majority World’ is a term coined to replace earlier sometimes anachronistic or misleading terms like ‘Third World’ or ‘Developing World’). The Theological Book Network is a Grand Rapids based non-profit, mitted to the creation and development of Majority World leaders by providing access to educational resources...
Marine Le Pen’s economics unite populist Right and far-Left
Emmanuel Macron may have won the first round of the French presidential elections on Sunday, but Marine Le Pen won a political victory of her own. The statist undercurrent running through her nationalist and populist policies successfully bridged the gap between France’s “far-Right” and socialist Left, according to Marco Respinti in a new essay for Religion & Liberty Transatlantic. Mainstream French politicians have sought bine disparate ideological strands since at least Charles de Gaulle, who presented his foreign policy as...
Audio: Victor Claar on whether Trump’s budget is un-Christian
Victor Claar speaks at Acton University On Saturday, Victor Claar, Professor of Economics at Henderson State University and Affiliate Scholar at the Acton Institute, joins host Julie Roys and Jenny Eaton Dyer of Hope Through Healing Hands on Moody Radio’sUp For Debateto discuss how Christians should respond to President Trump’s first budget proposal, especially as it relates to proposed cuts in US foreign aid. Dyer argues that Christians should be deeply concerned about the proposed cuts, while Claar argues that...
Why J.D. Vance is bringing venture capital to the Rust Belt
As Americans continue to face the disruptive effects of economic change, whether from technology, trade, or globalization, many have wondered how we might preserve or revivethe regions that have suffered most. For progressives and populists alike, the solutions are predictably focused on a menu of government interventions, from trade barriers to wage minimums to salary caps to a range of regulatory constraints. For conservatives and libertarians, the debate has less to do with policy and more to do with the...
Humans care about economic fairness, not economic inequality
A new study published in the science journal Nature Human Behaviour finds that in most situation people are unconcerned about economic inequality as long as distributions of wealth are fair: There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the munity and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two...
Remembering Kate O’Beirne
Longtime Acton Institute friend and supporter Kate O’Beirne passed away this past weekend. Below are Father Robert Sirico’s thoughts on this plished woman: I feel like I have always known Kate O’Beirne, so the passing of this woman of keen intellect, sharp wit and fearless rhetoric in confronting the nostrums of our day leaves me feeling very, very sad. It is painfully sad to think that the occasions of sharing National Review cruises or panel discussions with her or having...
Price Controls and Communism
Note: This is post #30 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. What happens when price controls are used munist countries? As Alex Tabarrok explains, all of the effects of price controls e amplified: there are even more shortages or surpluses of goods, lower product quality, longer lines and more search costs, more losses in gains from trade, and more misallocation of resources. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5...
Taxes on unhealthy food do nothing but hurt the poor
Throughout history, societies have found peculiar ways to reinforce social hierarchies and class-based discrimination. mon way is to prohibit certain social classes from being able to purchase a good. These types of laws that regulate permitted consumption of particular goods and services are known as sumptuary laws. A prime example is the 16th-century French law that banned anyone but princes from wearing velvet. Modern America is mitted to the appearance of egalitarianism to make laws that directly ban poor people...
Samuel Gregg on the fracturing of France
With the first round of the French election results in, and no major candidates even managing to get a quarter of the total votes, two candidates remain: Marine Le Pen of the National Front, a populist and nationalist party, and Emmanuel Macron, the center-Left candidate of the “En Marche!” (“On Our Way”) political party. Samuel Gregg covers the current politically disjointed state of Francein a new article for First Things. He maintains an attitude of skepticism and uncertainty towards France’s...
More than compassion needed for Europe’s refugees
“Irrespective of the political forces at play,” says Trey Dimsdale in this week’s Acton Commentary, “there is no arguing with the fact that such a large number of displaced immigrants presents a monumental humanitarian crisis in which survival es the initial, but not final, concern.” Prior to 2014, fewer than 300,000 refugees and migrants arrived in the European Union each year. Due to war and unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, that relatively slow trickle more than quadrupled...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved