Report: Trump admin policy kept over $100M taxpayer dollars from funding international abortions

The Trump administration’s expanded Mexico City Policy has succeeded in withholding millions of dollars from some of the world’s largest purveyors of abortion, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

Since President Reagan first instituted the pro-life Mexico City Policy in 1984, the policy has been implemented along partisan lines, with Democratic presidents rescinding it and Republican presidents reinstating it. The Trump administration’s expanded Mexico City Policy, officially known as the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, prohibits federal agencies from awarding global health funding to foreign nonprofits that commit or promote abortions.

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The GAO report found that seven major awardees, along with 47 smaller awardees, refused to accept the pro-life terms of the PLGHA assistance. The result was approximately $102 million in taxpayer dollars withheld from these abortion activist organizations. Among the seven large awardees that declined funds were two of the world’s most notorious abortion corporations: Marie Stopes International and the International Planned Parenthood Foundation. The two abortion giants turned down a combined total of $79 million. The UK-based Marie Stopes International advertises itself as responsible for providing “access to contraception and safe abortion” to 214 million women worldwide. The International Planned Parenthood Foundation, meanwhile, boasts of having delivered 223.2 million “sexual and reproductive health services” to women around the world in 2018.

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In response to the GAO report, Monica Kerrigan, executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, lamented in a statement to Newsweek that PLGHA “has been applied at an unprecedented scale, impacting a range of health services and weakening health systems.” Yet abortion is not healthcare, and is never medically necessary.

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Approximately $12 billion in taxpayer dollars are available through the PLGHA policy, with 96% of the funds administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Approximately two-thirds of the funds were allocated to support HIV/AIDS assistance, with the remaining amount supporting “other global health areas, such as maternal and child health, and family planning and reproductive health.”

The pro-life PLGHA policy has helped reduce U.S. support for what Culture of Life President Obianuju Ekeocha has blasted as the unwanted promotion of abortion in developing nations, especially in Africa. According to the GAO report, the vast majority of global health funding went to Africa, to include 32 of the 47 smaller “sub-awards” that were declined. “If we’re talking about abortion, well, I don’t think that any Western country has a right to pay for abortions in an African country, especially when the majority of people don’t want abortion… that then becomes a form of ideological colonization,” Ekeocha said in a bold 2017 BBC interview, as previously reported by Live Action News.

Funding abortions in developing countries is not a method of empowering the women living there, nor is it a way to provide those women education, health care, better jobs, or a way out of poverty. With less money being spent on abortion, more money can be given to truly help these women, such as with legitimate health care — and that is truly pro-life.

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