One big beautiful achievement

On Friday, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and in it he delivered a first-of-its-kind victory for the pro-life movement. While news coverage has largely focused on the bill’s tax and border security provisions, social conservatives should not sleep on Republicans’ unprecedented success in defunding Planned Parenthood through Congress’ reconciliation process. This is the latest and most substantive milestone in a half-century struggle to end federal funding for abortion.

Four years after the notorious Roe v. Wade decision enshrined abortion as the law of the land, Congressman Henry Hyde—one of the great and early congressional champions of the unborn—launched the first counter-salvo. His legislation, known today as the Hyde Amendment, succeeded in blocking most federal funding for abortion (just prior to its enactment, the federal government directly financed around 300,000 abortions a year).

But even after this early victory, abortionists continued to receive backdoor financing through Medicaid, Title X, and other federal programs. While the Hyde Amendment explicitly prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion procedures, the nation’s largest provider of abortions, Planned Parenthood, can still get Title X funding for providing child-killing abortifacients (misleadingly classified as “contraceptives”), even while it performs de jure abortions down the hallway with other money. In fact, Planned Parenthood has warned that many of its abortion clinics would be forced to close down if they lost federal funding, proving that taxpayer dollars are still propping up the abortion industry even with the Hyde Amendment in place.

In 2007, a younger (but, even then, white-haired) congressman by the name of Mike Pence introduced the first bill to stop abortion clinics from receiving any Title X money, even indirectly (eventually introducing legislation to bar abortionists from federal funding completely). A decade later, those legislative ambitions came full circle as a freshly inaugurated Vice President Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate allowing states to defund Title X.

As important and exciting as this victory from the first Trump administration was, Title X only accounted for 13 percent of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. Almost all the rest came from Medicaid. And yet the circumstances that allowed for the first administration’s success with Title X seemed irreplicable in the case of Medicaid. In the former case, the Obama administration had overreached with a federal rule barring the states from blocking Planned Parenthood’s access to Title X funding. Because of those particular circumstances, Congress could overturn the Obama rule with a special legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act, which—like reconciliation—only required a simple majority in each chamber.

Medicaid, on the other hand, seemed to have no such silver bullet. Even the Heritage Foundation (perhaps the most influential think tank of the conservative movement at that time) felt forced to concede that defunding Planned Parenthood could not be accomplished via reconciliation. And for a decade, those concessions appeared correct. In 2017, when Republicans attempted to defund Planned Parenthood in reconciliation anyway, those provisions were flagged as invalid and stripped out.

But the pro-life movement is battle-hardened from decades of setbacks. Rather than throw in the towel, members of Congress and pro-life organizations kept working to find a way through, workshopping their case that the defunding provision met the parameters for inclusion in reconciliation. While the initial version of the bill, which would have blocked Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid for ten years, was rejected, a shorter one-year version of the provision was able to pass muster, and, with the help of Vice President J.D. Vance, pass in the Senate as well.

As a result, hundreds of millions of federal dollars will no longer flow to Planned Parenthood, some of their abortion facilities may close, and many more babies will have a fighting chance to be born.

While much more remains to be done to ensure that the sanctity of life is fully enshrined as the law of the land, social conservatives ought to celebrate this major milestone in the fight for life.