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California Attorney General Xavier Becerra

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Biden administration Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra repeatedly refused to answer whether partial-birth abortion is illegal during a congressional hearing Thursday, raising fresh doubts about the Biden administration’s willingness to enforce federal law upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court more than a decade ago.

Becerra, previously the Attorney General of California, repeatedly evaded giving a straight yes-or-no answer to the question in response to grilling by Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana:

“Is it illegal?” Daines asked. Becerra began to instead assert a woman’s “right” to pre-viability abortions under Roe v. Wade, but was cut off by Daines, who restated the question. During a minute-long exchange, Becerra would say only that it was a “technical question,” and that “a woman has the right to receive an abortion.”

In fact, former President George W. Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act into law in 2003, and the Supreme Court upheld it in 2007 with Gonzales v. Carhart. President Joe Biden, then a Senator representing Delaware, was among the Democrats who voted in favor of the ban.

In the years since, however, Biden has jettisoned all of his former more moderate views on abortion in favor of an absolutist “pro-choice” agenda that includes forcing all 50 states to allow effectively-unlimited abortion at taxpayer expense. Biden abandoned the last vestige of his pro-life past during the 2020 Democrat presidential primary, when he dropped his support for the Hyde amendment (which bars direct federal funding of most abortions) after just a day of pressure from left-wing activists.

In light of Biden’s opposition to letting states enact even modest protections for the preborn, Becerra’s answer raises suspicions that refusing to recognize a federal pro-life law is a signal that the Biden administration has no intention of enforcing it.

Beccera’s testimony comes as little surprise in light of his record. As attorney general of the Golden State, Becerra showed a marked hostility to Americans who follow Judeo-Christian teaching on matters such as abortion and homosexuality, from forcing churches to subsidize elective abortions and nuns to subsidize contraceptives, to forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion resources, to refusing to fund state employees’ travel to South Carolina in protest of its law protecting adoption agencies that insist on giving children both a mother and a father.