Biden-Harris Memo on Protecting Women’s Health Elides Real Health Issues, Enlists Religious Dissenters in Funding Abortion

Each new administration brings with it challenges and opportunities for upholding America’s First Freedom. The Biden Administration is already taking actions that will shape religious liberty in America for years to come, and this article is the second in a series intended to assess these efforts. Written by scholars and experts affiliated with the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI), articles in this series highlight key executive orders, proposed regulations, dear colleague letters, and similar policy statements and provide insight into their implications for religious freedom. Sometimes they will be written for a general audience and other times for a particular religious community—public discourse in a pluralistic society takes both forms, and RFI intentionally brings them together here.

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One week and two days into its first term, the Biden-Harris Administration issued a Memorandum on Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad. The Memorandum included the Democratic Party’s customary revocation of the Mexico City Policy, a global pro-life Executive Order revived or annulled with partisan fanfare at the outset of each administration. The Memorandum also called for review of the Trump Administration’s Title X Rule, which echoed Supreme Court-upheld compliance regulations for U.S. domestic family planning funds. It rescinded the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy, which ensured more uniform application of the Mexico City Policy across the U.S. Government’s broad foreign aid portfolio. And it ordered U.S. withdrawal from the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a pro-life document cosigned by more than thirty U.N. member countries in response to United Nations pressure to include abortion in the COVID-19 health response.

The Memorandum’s grand reach is a reminder of the U.S. Government’s pride of place among Western social issues superpowers: ready, able, and expected to steer discourse via rhetoric, alliances, and cash infusions. And it puts a fine point on the power of America’s domestic abortion divide to trigger global whiplash, variously impacting millions of women, men, and children in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, people whose religious identities often play a pivotal role in their understanding of the human person and abortion.

U.S. abortion rates have fallen to an all-time low, marking a milestone that pro-choice and pro-life advocates of all political and faith persuasions can laud. Still, domestic abortion advocates are pushing healthcare workers to participate in abortions, regardless of conscience concerns, and doubling-down on demands for employer-provided contraception and taxpayer-subsidized abortion. Biden’s pick for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, appears poised to move forward accordingly. Meanwhile, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faith communities want a U.S. civil forum free of coercive requirements to partner with, promote, or financially support abortion providers, and diverse voices such as Muslim scholar Hamza Yusuf, the Coalition for Jewish Values, and the predominantly African-American denomination Church of God in Christ link with groups like Rehumanize International and Secular Pro-Life—which welcome Buddhists, Wiccans, and other U.S. religious minorities—in a broad pro-life alliance.

Meanwhile, the Global South remains markedly pro-life. Despite Western donor countries’ eager and generous campaigns to promote abortion, contraception, sterilization, and related legislation and policy reforms, The Center for Reproductive Rights reports that nearly 90% of countries surveyed on legislative trends prohibit or broadly restrict abortion, often allowing it only in cases of rape, incest, or fetal impairment. Uganda, Kenya, Haiti, Poland, Indonesia, and the Philippines are among the diverse group of countries that hold the most conservative abortion laws. What do these countries have in common? All have a high prevalence of religious belief, and cultures where faith is deeply integrated into both personal and civic understandings of the human person, the nature of life and death, and how the most fundamental human relationships—those of children, parents, and spouses—are encouraged, established, and nurtured.

Obianuju Ekeocha, a Nigerian biomedical scientist and founder of Culture of Life Africa, is among the most prominent voices leading a Global South response to what some perceive as neocolonialist pressures to accept global abortion and contraception access. Ekeocha, who is Catholic, advocates for “integral care of the person” and argues that what African women really want is “to give birth safely” and access “the most basic health care.” UNICEF confirms that the majority of countries with high maternal mortality ratios are located in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Ekeocha’s concerns echo those of Ryan Scott Bomberger, a Black Christian pro-life leader in the United States. Bomberger’s Radiance Foundation promotes publicly available data showing that in America’s black communities, abortion rates “are 69 times higher than HIV deaths, 31 times higher than (all other) homicides, 3.6 times higher than cancer-related deaths, and 3.5 times higher than deaths caused by heart disease.”

Ekeochoa and Bomberger share a resonant commonality with the Geneva Consensus cosigners, the global coalition of COVID-era pro-life leaders with whom the Biden-Harris Administration readily parted ways. The Geneva Consensus drafters drew exclusively from accepted U.N. agreements—including the Cairo Consensus and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—to propose COVID-19 health care delivery principles responsive to real needs and respectful of religious differences.

With a broader scope and a more inclusive approach, the Biden-Harris Administration could make crucial investments in the real health care needs that women and their families face—including pre- and post-natal care and interventions to address HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer, heart disease, and the devastating effects of systemic violence. For much of the watching world—especially countries whose levels of wealth, power, and religiosity are at odds with those of the ascendant West—the Memorandum on Protecting Women’s Health at Home and Abroad offers little more than a familiar Faustian bargain.

Other Articles in This Series: