U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Dorchester) offered praise for President Joe Biden and his administration for the pro-abortion agenda, calling pro-life policies racist in the process.
Pressley put out a statement on Thursday in response to a pair of executive orders signed by President Biden as well as another policy Biden wants to implement.
On Thursday, Biden rescinded the Mexico City policy via executive order and reversed a Trump administration order that blocked Title X funding from going to abortion providers. Pressley wants him to go further and repeal the Hyde Amendment so that Medicaid pays for elective abortions as well.
“Today’s executive orders are a welcome and long overdue first step in undoing the years of policy violence exacted by the Trump-Pence administration,” Pressley said in a statement. “By rescinding the dangerous global gag rule and taking the first step to rescind harmful Trump era changes to the Title X program, the Biden Administration is expanding access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare for millions of people here in the United States and around the world.
“However, after four years of Donald Trump and decades of harmful anti-reproductive justice policies on the federal and state level, marginalized communities deserve more than rescinding Trump’s racist and sexist policies,” she added. “The Biden-Harris administration must go further to meet this moment by making good on their promise to end the Hyde amendment and other harmful restrictions for abortion care access and commit to truly advancing reproductive justice in our nation.”
The Mexico City Policy, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, requires foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to certify that they will not ‘perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning’ using funds from any source (including non-U.S. funds) as a condition of receiving U.S. government global family planning assistance and, as of Jan. 23, 2017, most other U.S. global health assistance.”
During fiscal year 2021, the United States will spend $750 million on international family planning programs, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, the Mexico City Policy has prevented that money from going to abortion providers. Under Biden, however, that will change.
Signed into law in 1970 by the pro-abortion Richard Nixon, the Title X Family Planning Program offers federal funding to family planning providers. However, in 2019, President Trump blocked those who refer people to abortion providers from receiving federal funding, as USA Today points out.
Pressley once again repeated her trope that terminating the life of unborn children is a racial justice issue.
“Barriers to abortion care are racial and economic justice issues, and must be treated as such. For too long, Black, Brown, indigenous, immigrant, young people, LGBTQ, and low-income people been denied access to healthcare justice and abortion care based on their age, source of insurance, zip code, and income,” Pressley said in the statement. “In this moment of reckoning on racial injustice, I call on the Biden-Harris administration to join us in the fight to bring an end to these racist abortion coverage bans once and for all by sending Congress a budget without Hyde and any other coverage bans.”
Abortion disproportionately ends the lives of black babies. Despite being 13 percent of the population, blacks have 28 percent of the abortions in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Overall, 61 percent of women who have abortions each year are non-white.
A recent poll from Marist found that a pair of abortion positions supported by Pressley and the Biden administration are unpopular with the American public. They found that 58 percent of Americans oppose using taxpayer funding for abortion. That number climbed to 77 percent opposition when it came to American tax dollars funding abortion overseas.
Opposing the Hyde Amendment is a new position for Biden. The 78-year-old supported it until June 2019, as The New York Times points out.
Before Biden took office, the United States already had some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world. It is one of only seven countries that allows elective abortions to occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy, alongside North Korea and China, as The Washington Post confirms.
