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The Bush Administration's Record on Life Issues 1/23/2006
By Michael Schwartz The President's years in office show significant gains for the pro-life issue.
President George W. Bush campaigned as a pro-life candidate, has identified himself on several occasions as a pro-life President, and has maintained close contact with the pro-life movement in order to keep his administration informed about the movement’s hopes and concerns. There is no doubt that this administration is striving to be, and to be perceived as, pro-life. A topical review of its performance in that area follows.
- MEXICO CITY POLICY
The Mexico City policy, initiated by President Reagan in 1986, prohibits federal population-aid funds from going to foreign nongovernmental organizations that commit or promote abortion. It was revoked by President Clinton, but Congress voted repeatedly during the Clinton years to apply this limitation legislatively. President Bush restored the Mexico City policy on January 22, 2001, as one of his first presidential acts. Moreover, in 2003 the Bush administration expanded the Mexico City policy so that, in addition to funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it would also apply to the entire State Department.
- UNFPAThe United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA’s) cooperation with the one-child/forced abortion program in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provoked congressional opposition to U.S. support for the agency, and this became the subject of bitter congressional struggles on annual appropriations bills during the Clinton years. At issue was the Kemp-Kasten provision in the Foreign Assistance Act, which entirely prohibits U.S. assistance to any program that involves forced abortion or forced sterilization. Pro-life congressional leaders claimed that the U.S. contribution to UNFPA violated this law, while the Clinton administration simply ignored it.
President Bush sent a fact-finding mission to PRC (as did the British government), and the report of that mission confirmed (a) that the PRC’s population program was coercive within the meaning of Kemp-Kasten and (b) that UNFPA, while not directly engaging in coercion, was playing an integral role in the implementation of the Chinese program. Therefore, U.S. funding of UNFPA was declared unlawful under Kemp-Kasten, and the funds appropriated for that purpose were redirected to maternal and child health programs. Since 2002 he has suspended more than $90 million to the U.N. Population Fund and continues to stand strong in that decision. This decision of the administration has provoked ferocious opposition, but the administration has held firm while actively encouraging both China and UNFPA to end coercive population control practices.
- UNITED NATIONS CONFERENCES
During the Clinton years, United Nations conferences provided critical leverage for foisting upon the developing world the corrupt anti-life agenda of ideologues from North America and Europe. Throughout the Clinton years, the U.S. delegations to these conferences, from Cairo to Istanbul, were the epicenter of evil.
Within days of the inauguration of President Bush, the tenor of the U.S. delegations to the United Nations was transformed utterly. Without exception, at every U.N. event since January 2001 the U.S. delegations have been a consistent and leading force for the life-affirming principles of civilization, offering critically needed leadership against the creation of international “rights” to abortion and to the independence of children from their parents, against the international legitimization of homosexual and transsexual conduct, against human cloning, and in favor of the existence and rights of families. Perhaps because U.N. conferences are not in the public eye, the excellent work of the U.S. delegations has gone largely unnoticed. Perhaps for the same reason, the administration has been clearer and more forceful in its advocacy of pro-life policies than it has been in its domestic policies.
- GLOBAL AIDS
The President’s bold 2003 initiative to confront the AIDS epidemic in Africa is, in itself, a pro-life policy, but it has major implications for the broad agenda of the pro-life movement. When the President first announced his intention to seek legislative authorization for this project, some pro-life leaders called for applying the Mexico City policy to this program; but since its objective is not population control, the Mexico City policy did not apply to it, and there is now widespread, if not universal, agreement that this demand was not relevant.
Instead, pro-life forces concentrated on getting written into the law provisions directing percentages of the funds to patient care, orphans and other purposes; to requiring that a certain percentage of prevention funds be used for abstinence education; and that grantees be required to oppose the legalization of prostitution. None of these provisions would have been included in the bill if President Bush had not personally intervened and insisted that the White House position on these questions be made clear to Congress. The support for abstinence and the opposition to prostitution at the center of this program have been the focus of intense opposition from anti-life special interests.
Implementation of the Global AIDS program has been less than perfect because a large share of the funds for this project have been directed by Congress to the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a bureaucracy that remains intractable to presidential control. USAID has too often been a self-managing agency on a mission to snuff out the light of civilization and spread a culture of perversion and death around the world. The administration has shown signs of recognizing and attempting to grapple with this problem, but congressional allies of USAID on the Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittees have stymied its efforts.
- ASSISTED SUICIDE
Oregon voters approved a law giving physicians the right to kill their patients if they filled out the requisite paperwork expressly declaring their intention to kill and if they used a federally controlled drug as the murder weapon. But doctors hold a federal, not a state, license to prescribe drugs and under federal law drugs may be prescribed only for a “legitimate medical purpose.”
Janet Reno, Attorney General during the Clinton administration, ruled that deliberately killing a patient is a “legitimate medical purpose” in those states (i.e., Oregon) where it is permitted. This contradicts the fundamental principle of the uniformity of federal law, a principle so basic to our American system that Miss Reno’s action arguably should have resulted in her impeachment and removal from office for gross incompetence. Instead, legislation was proposed to restore coherence to the law and it, not surprisingly, died in the Senate.
During John Ashcroft’s first year as Attorney General in President Bush’s first term, Ashcroft corrected Reno’s error by clarifying that federal law on controlled drugs applies to all states equally. The Justice Department filed the case Gonzalez v. Oregon, which ultimately was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. In its January 17 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal Controlled Substances Act does not allow the U.S. Attorney General to prohibit doctors from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide. Perhaps the Congress will take up legislation on this issue. Until then, the Bush administration has done what it can do.
- S-CHIP
One of the first and most imaginative administrative acts of the Bush administration with regard to life issues was a regulation defining unborn children as eligible recipients of services under the State Child Health Insurance Plan (S-CHIP), which allows state Medicaid funds to be used to provide health coverage for children who are otherwise uninsured. This regulatory change will make prenatal care available to several hundred thousand mothers and babies each year, but because it makes the benefit to the mother contingent on the eligibility of the baby for services, it provoked angry opposition from the abortion lobby – even though the abortion lobby is strongest among liberals who, in any other circumstance, would praise the expansion of eligibility for any kind of social service. No principle, apparently, is more important than maintaining the pretense that an unborn child is an un-person.
- ABSTINENCE
President Bush is the Abstinence President. He is not afraid of this issue. He talks about it, demands a fair level of funding for it, and has tried to ensure that people who really do support the concept administer the federal programs for abstinence education. Under President Bush, abstinence-education programs are growing roots, and if the level of federal funding for these programs continues to grow over the next four years, they could very well be ineradicable by the time he leaves office.
The commitment of the President to abstinence education is beyond question since his 2004 State of the Union Address, in which he proposed a doubling of abstinence funding in a budget that was otherwise trying to control domestic spending. The performance of the administration has matched that commitment. In 2005, President Bush proposed to increase abstinence-education funding by $39 million. Congress granted only an $11 million increase, but this has a direct and dramatic effect on the strength of the pro-life movement. The leading abstinence educators in many communities are pregnancy centers, and the leading fomenters of sex outside of marriage are the foot soldiers of the abortion lobby.
- MEDICAID WAIVERS
One ominous development over the past few years is the pattern of granting waivers to the states from Medicaid regulations so that they may offer “family planning” services to women who lose their Medicaid eligibility, generally through an increase in income. As the welfare reform is successfully turning poor people into formerly poor people, those qualifying for Medicaid are declining in numbers, and the states have Medicaid money to spare. Instead of doing the right thing and giving this money back to the people they took it from, the states are requesting and receiving permission to use it to provide “family planning” services to the formerly poor.
This started with a request from Wisconsin, which was granted by Health and Human Services’ former Secretary Tommy Thompson in 2001, but now about half the states have been granted such waivers. The total amount of Medicaid money now used to provide “family planning” services to persons no longer eligible for Medicaid is approximately equal to the total amount of money provided under Title X, $286 million. Most of this money goes to Planned Parenthood.
- THE FDA: RU-486 AND THE MORNING-AFTER PILL
When President Clinton came into office, he instructed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take the necessary steps to get the abortion drug RU-486 approved. That was a complicated undertaking which took the FDA almost the entire eight years of Clinton’s tenure in office and which, in order to achieve that goal on Clinton’s watch, required the agency to violate its internal procedures, the canons of good science, federal regulations, and quite possibly the law. But the FDA did clear RU-486 for approval on September 28, 2000, while Clinton was still in office. The controversy over this approval was still fresh when the Bush administration came into office, and then-Secretary Thompson said that a decision about revoking it would depend upon the drug’s safety.
The approval of RU-486 was unlawful and unleashed an unsafe drug on women. Concerned Women for America, along with the Christian Medical Association and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, submitted to the FDA a Citizen Petition explicating this fact in great detail in August 2002. It discussed seven very serious breaches of law and regulation in the approval process, two of which might have been addressed by modification of the approval, but the other five of which clearly required the revocation of that approval. Since 2001, five North American women (four U.S., one Canadian) have died from septic shock after taking RU-486. Despite these unnecessary deaths, the FDA has not yet acted on the Citizen Petition.
In 2002 the President appointed Dr. David Hager to an advisory committee of the FDA dealing with reproductive drugs. This is an unpaid position with no authority, but the abortion lobby responded with frenzy. No other issue that year generated more e-mails through the Planned Parenthood Web site, and major so-called “news” magazines ran malicious articles attacking Dr. Hager as a “scantily credentialed” religious fanatic.
In fact, Dr. Hager is one of the most eminent physicians in America, with an extraordinarily long list of scholarly publications and citations from Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal as one of the nation’s “best doctors for women.” His crime? He is openly pro-life and Christian and spoke on behalf of the Citizen Petition against RU-486. Congratulations to the President for appointing Dr. Hager, for standing by that appointment under pressure, and then for reappointing him.
The committee on which Dr. Hager serves is one of two advisory committees that jointly considered a proposal to make the morning-after pill Plan B available over-the-counter (OTC) rather than by prescription. The fact that those two committees voted 17 to 4 (Hager in the minority) to approve that request says a great deal about the scientific carelessness, disregard for public health, and general predisposition to place politics above medicine on the part of Dr. Hager’s colleagues. To its credit, the FDA did not take the advice of these two advisory committees, but the abortion lobby continues to make its cause du jour the attainment of OTC status for overdoses of this prescription drug.
In September 2005, the FDA declined to say yea or nay when the latest effort to make Plan B available over the counter only to those over age 16 came before them. The agency requested guidance on whether it has the authority to, in an unprecedented action, make the drug available over the counter with an age restriction, and if that age restriction could be enforced. The FDA asked for comments from citizens. Currently, the ruling that the pill will not be available without prescription still stands, but abortion advocates continue to exert their pressure.
- BIOETHICS
President Bush tapped University of Chicago philosopher Leon Kass to head a new presidential advisory commission on bioethics, and under Professor Kass’ leadership the commission has produced some excellent documents. However, because of the President’s desire to be fair and balanced, the commission not only included prominent and able advocates of a culture of death, but did not even have a pro-life majority (see the pattern with FDA advisory bodies, above). Consequently, the commission was able to achieve far less than it should have, given the high quality of its leadership and staff, due to the contentiousness of some of its members. Apparently, new appointments will correct this problem.
In 2005 the president appointed Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., professor emeritus at Georgetown University, to be a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and upon appointment designated him to be the new chairperson. Leon Kass remains on the committee.
- STEM-CELL EXPERIMENTATION
The President’s first major address to the nation, in August 2001, was on the subject of research on stem cells taken from human embryos. In it, he reiterated his commitment to the sanctity of human life, and then announced that he would allow federal funds to be used for research on cell lines derived from stem cells taken from embryos who had been killed prior to that date (August 9, 2001), but not on cell lines from embryos killed later than that date. The point was that he did not want federal research funds to be used either to kill or to reward the killing of embryonic humans. That is all well and good, although there is still a formidable ethical objection to using the product of experiments on human subjects who have been murdered, even if you had nothing to do with the killing.
Despite being hammered by untruthful accusations, reaching a crescendo with the speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention by Ron Reagan Jr., who frankly advocated the whole clone-and-kill program, the administration has not wavered from the President’s position.
In December 2005, President Bush signed the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005, which will offer more life-saving therapies through cord-blood stem cells for Americans facing devastating illnesses such as leukemia, sickle cell anemia, Krabbe’s disease and more. This tactical move helps give sound argument for funding adult stem-cell research. Throughout his time in office, President Bush has maintained his promise to veto any bill that expands the current embryonic stem-cell policy.
- ADOPTION
The Bush administration has implemented the new Infant Adoption Awareness Act by engaging the National Council for Adoption and pregnancy help centers across the country – the best partners it could possibly have. This administration gives every indication about being serious in promoting adoption, including a Web site that has facilitated more than 3,000 adoptions, conferences to engage the faith community in adoption, and a public-service advertising campaign to promote adoptions, especially of children in foster care.
- JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Under President Bush the Department of Justice has aggressively defended the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, whose legality will likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court; opened investigations on violations of federal law in attacks on churches, pregnancy centers and pro-life displays; and resolved an action against pro-life activists it inherited from Janet Reno.
- TERRI SCHIAVO – S. 686
The President got up at midnight to sign the bill S. 686. This bill made it possible for the federal courts to hear a claim on behalf of severely disabled Terri Schiavo regarding the violation of her constitutional or legal rights “relating to the withholding or withdrawal of food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life,” as the legislation states. He also made a statement concerning the bill on March 21, 2005, in which he stated that he would continue to favor life for all Americans.
Although the courts overturned S. 686, Terri’s case gained wide exposure and raised national awareness of the need to protect the lives of the disabled and/or the severely ill.
- BORN-ALIVE INFANTS PROTECTION ACT
President Bush signed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in 2002. This law gives live-born infants full legal rights under federal law, apart from their stage of development or whether their birth occurred as a result of an abortion. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took steps to improve compliance with the Act.
- PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION BAN
After an eight-year legislative battle, President Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003. This outlawed all partial-birth abortion except in instances where the procedure would be necessary to save the life of the mother. At the signing, President Bush clearly stated that this Act confronted the violence against innocent children in our nation. The Department of Justice is vigorously defending the law in the courts against the abortion lobby’s inevitable challenges.
Michael Schwartz is the former Vice President for Government Relations
at Concerned Women for America.
Updated by CWA staff
January 18, 2006
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