Last chance: send comments to HHS on the Protect Life Rule

Tomorrow is the deadline to submit your comments to the Department of Health & Human Services in support of the Protect Life Rule. This regulation limits the ability of abortion businesses to obtain government subsidies through the Title X program. Title X is intended to fund contraception, not abortion. The Protect Life Rule will prioritize funding for federally qualified health centers and other community clinics that provide legitimate healthcare, including contraceptives, without killing anybody.

You can read the proposed rule here and submit your supportive comment here. I wrote:

I strongly support the proposed rule. For too long, Title X funds have subsidized abortion vendors. The provision of taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood—which has repeatedly defrauded Medicaid and failed to report the sexual abuse of children, among other scandals—is especially troubling. Federally qualified health centers and other community clinics are far more deserving recipients of Title X funds, and are fully capable of meeting women’s nonviolent family planning needs.

Abortion lobbyists have predictably mischaracterized the Protect Life Rule as a “gag rule” that censors doctors. That’s nonsense. Abortionists remain welcome to say whatever they like. And the government remains free to direct its tax revenue to deserving healthcare providers that do not destroy innocent human lives.

The Protect Life Rule is not even particularly novel. A similar rule was briefly put in place by the Reagan administration (but soon reversed by the abortion-friendly Clinton administration). Abortion industry groups brought a legal challenge at the time, which the Supreme Court rejected, holding that the funding limitation did not run afoul of the First Amendment; rather, the government “has merely chosen to fund one activity [family planning] to the exclusion of the other [abortion].”

Planned Parenthood would stand to lose, and nonviolent clinics would stand to gain, $60 million a year when the Protect Life Rule is enacted. While we’d still have a long way to go in removing Planned Parenthood’s total government subsidy of approximately $500 million a year, this is a substantial first step. Submit your comment today!