WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – President Joe Biden marked International Women’s Day on Tuesday by suggesting that women cannot “live up to their full God-given potential” without abortion-on-demand.
“Every person deserves the chance to live up to their full God-given potential, without regard for gender or other factors,” Biden’s statement recognizing the holiday read. “Yet too often, in too many places, women and girls face obstacles that limit their possibilities and undermine their participation in economic, political, and social life.”
Among his efforts to “ma[ke] gender equity a cornerstone of my Administration,” the president listed the fact that he “launched a whole-of-government effort to protect reproductive rights,” a popular euphemism for legal abortion.
During his first week in office, Biden repealed the Mexico City Policy, which bars foreign aid from going to organizations involved with abortion; two months later, he created a White House Gender Policy Council that identified among its goals the promotion of abortion at home and abroad. In October, Biden rescinded the Trump administration’s block on funding abortionists via the Title X family planning program.
In January of this year, his administration announced a Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force “composed of senior-level HHS officials who have been designated by their respective agencies to identify and coordinate activities across the Department to protect and bolster access to essential sexual and reproductive health care” via a range of actions, including research, identifying and eliminating pro-life policies that remain in existing federal programs, advancing new pro-abortion policies and guidances, and supporting efforts to normalize abortion by mitigating its stigmatization.
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced $6.6 million in Title X grants to a handful of public and private entities ostensibly affected by state pro-life laws, including two Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas as well as Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.
This month, Biden also announced that he wants $2.6 billion from Congress to fund “gender equality” programs, which if granted would likely include more abortion funding, and called it “dangerous” for states to ban abortion at 15 weeks.
Further, the president supports legislation to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law, and expand it to forbid states from subjecting abortion to ultrasound requirements, mandatory waiting periods, informed-consent requirements, and other health and safety regulations, such as admitting privileges; as well as protect so-called “webcam” abortions (i.e., dispensing abortion pills without an in-person doctor’s visit), forbid banning abortions on the basis of a baby’s race, sex, or disability, and forbid banning particular techniques such as dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedures, better known as “dismemberment” abortions because they entail literally ripping unborn babies apart in the womb, then removing them from the uterus limb by limb.
Biden’s vigorous abortion promotion is starkly at odds with his professed Catholic affiliation. While liberal Catholics and their secular allies routinely present abortion as just one debatable issue among many of equal moral weight, since the first century A.D. it has been an “unchanegable” teaching of Catholic doctrine on human life to recognize abortion as a “moral evil,” complicity in which “constitutes a grave offense” carrying the “canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.”
Former Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput argues that it “give[s] scandal” for Catholic churches to administer Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians, because it “creat[es] the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional … Reception of Communion is not a right but a gift and privilege; and on the subject of ‘rights,’ the believing community has a priority right to the integrity of its belief and practice.”