The turnaround has its foundations in the quiet, behind-the-scenes influence of Vice President Mike Pence, who has been driven throughout his political career by his evangelical Christian beliefs to restrict abortion and prioritize the rights of religious conservatives. Pence has been in the spotlight
1 / 17FILE PHOTO: U.S. Vice President Mike Pence speaks at CPAC in WashingtonFILE PHOTO: U.S. Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference annual meeting at National Harbor near Washington, U.S., March 1, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File PhotoBy Yasmeen Abutaleb and Joseph Tanfani
Under the direction of two secretaries recommended by Pence, the Department of Health and Human Services has moved to slash funds from teen pregnancy-prevention programs, curb abortion both in the United States and abroad and strip civil protections for transgender patients. “There has never been anything like it,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, said of her working relationship with Pence. “The policy I believe can’t get done without Vice President Pence and his team.”
The shift has generated legal challenges, and chunks of the agenda are bottlenecked in the courts. Recently, a federal judge in Washington State blocked new rules meant to cut funding from facilities offering abortion. “One of the benefits of Trump’s Twitter approach is it creates headlines, and that’s what it’s intended to do, and underneath those headlines, everyone else in the administration can go about peacefully doing their job,” said David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth and a longtime Pence friend. HHS has “released several very important, significant regulations that changed the nature of Obamacare, of healthcare, with very little coverage in the press.
One senior HHS official told Reuters the agency is correcting the course set by the Obama administration on the government’s role in enforcing LGBT rights and whether providers have to perform abortions. “Our rights to religious freedom have too long been treated as a second-class right compared to others and it’s time for that to change,” said Roger Severino, director of the agency’s Civil Rights Division.
The vice president’s allies and former aides are salted throughout the administration, carrying out significant shifts in federal health insurance programs. One change cheered by the religious right made it easier for employers to not cover contraception. Three times, he introduced bills to bar HHS from funding Planned Parenthood. His efforts failed, but won him fierce loyalty among anti-abortion activists.
Another focus has been the Mexico City Policy involving U.S. aid to non-government groups. “It’s unfortunate enough that we continue to fund Planned Parenthood here in the U.S.; we don’t need to export a pro-abortion ideology overseas,” Pence said at a House hearing in 2007. At the United Nations and World Health Organization, U.S. representatives appointed under Trump-Pence have worked to pull references to “gender” and “sexual and reproductive health” from international rights documents.
Emails and memos from U.S. officials at the U.N. obtained by Reuters show the influence of the Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-Fam, a private U.S. research institute formed to affect policy at the U.N. to align with conservative Catholic views. In a fundraising pitch, C-Fam’s president, Austin Ruse, said “sexual orientation and gender identity is code for odious sexual behavior and gender lunacy.
“Oh dear,” replied a State Department official. “I do hope we can find a way to rectify this language.” The phrase, alluding to “reproductive rights,” did not make it into the final version. Planned Parenthood still received Title X money this year, though cut from about $28 million to $16 million. And HHS took a new step, awarding up to $5.1 million to Obria, a network of medical clinics in southern California funded in large part by Catholic groups that describes itself as “led by God” and does not offer abortions. Obria in May sued HHS on religious freedom grounds, saying it shouldn’t have to participate in abortions to spend the grant money.
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