Three months into his presidency, President Biden has begun to ramp up his administration’s ambitious agenda on abortion access.
The administration is moving to make abortion on demand a priority. Three months into his presidency, President Joe Biden has begun to ramp up his administration’s ambitious agenda on abortion access, the aggressive approach already yielding benefits for the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. Last week, Biden reversed a Trump administration rule barring groups who provide abortions or abortion referrals from receiving government funding from Title X, the country’s family-planning program for low-income patients. When the “domestic gag rule,” as it was dubbed by abortion advocates, was introduced in 2019, Planned Parenthood responded by announcing that it would simply withdraw from Title X. If Biden’s rule is finalized, a process that can take several months, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said the abortion provider may return to the program at some point next year. Also last week, the Biden administration loosened restrictions around at-home medication abortions, a significant victory for pro-abortion groups. In a reversal of a Trump-era policy, FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said her agency would stop enforcing a restriction requiring women using abortion pills to obtain the first drug in the two-dose regimen, mifepristone, in person from a medical provider. The FDA will now allow women to obtain the pills by mail during the coronavirus pandemic. Pro-life groups were quick to point out the FDA’s own data from 2018 showing 768 hospitalizations and 24 deaths since 2000 among women using abortion pills, along with thousands of cases of infections, blood loss requiring a transfusion, and other adverse events. “With this action, the Biden administration has made it clear that it will prioritize abortion over women’s safety. Allowing unsupervised chemical abortions via telemedicine, without requiring timely access to medical care, will put women in grave danger,” said Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life.
