Taxpayers and the taking of lives

House Speaker Mike Johnson achieved an incredible and unexpected pro-life victory last year. But, despite this great victory’s significance, it seems likely to disappear this summer without public notice or debate.

With a record-slim majority last year, Speaker Johnson defunded the largest provider of abortions in America: Planned Parenthood. That victory for the unborn fades away on the nation’s 250th anniversary if Congress doesn’t act soon. The previous year’s victory had a July 4, 2026, expiration date on it that almost no one in Congress seems to be aware of, as conservatives focus on other priorities like border security, election integrity, and Iran.

One exception that proves the rule is the Republican Study Committee (RSC) and its proposal to follow up the one-year funding ban with a provision to make it permanent. Last year, efforts at making the measure permanent fell flat due to the details of the Senate’s parliamentary procedure. This year, RSC staff have ingeniously trained AI to write a bill that could overcome those procedural roadblocks. But to succeed, Congress will need more than large language model tools; it will require grit and determination previously unseen by members often unwilling to do the bare minimum for the unborn. And they must succeed.

When the government writes a check, it makes a moral choice. And when that check goes to the nation’s largest abortion provider, the claim that those funds are neatly segregated by purpose cannot withstand serious scrutiny.

Contrary to what abortion activists might say, defunding Planned Parenthood is not a thinly veiled attempt to cut critical funding for women’s health. Progressives often argue that these taxpayer dollars support contraception, cancer screenings, and STI testing—but not abortions. On its surface, this argument appears sensible. But upon closer examination, it becomes incoherent. The supposed separation of allocated funds begins to blur, raising deeper moral questions that cannot easily be dismissed.

To understand why, one must turn to the tradition of natural law that has long shaped Christian moral reflection. Natural law reasoning holds that the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being is an intrinsic evil. This is not merely a religious or theological claim. It is a moral fact, articulated by thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas, that deliberately ending innocent human life is categorically distinct from other harms. 

Planned Parenthood performs more than 400,000 abortions each year, leaving it responsible for ending more innocent human life in the United States than any other organization. Whatever other services Planned Parenthood provides, this fact is not incidental to its identity. Abortion is not a peripheral activity; it is central to the organization’s mission, publicly defended, and structurally embedded in its operations.

Although Planned Parenthood’s advertising deceptively focuses on legitimate forms of healthcare, the group’s numbers don’t lie. While repeated attempts have been made to cover up all financial information regarding abortion services, pro-life groups like Live Action have estimated that Planned Parenthood receives at least $235 million per year in revenue from chemical and surgical abortions.

Every dollar provided by the government and directed towards legitimate healthcare services frees up other core funds to go towards the organization’s primary source of revenue—abortion. And even if government dollars are formally restricted to other services, they nonetheless support the broader institutional framework within which abortions are performed. 

Recent policy developments have exposed how fundamentally divided the debate across the nation has become, especially ahead of the 2026 midterms. The Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade did not end the abortion issue. Instead, it sent it back to state and federal legislatures. Abortion procedures have continued to reach 1 million annually, with a 25% increase in abortion pills being accessed by telehealth between 2024-2025.

The RSC’s proposal to make permanent what pro-life legislators enacted temporarily last year should not be seen as an outlier, but as a logical extension of a broader principle. And that principle is that the government should not force citizens to subsidize the institutions that provide abortions.

The question, ultimately, is not whether funds can be administratively separated, but whether moral responsibility can be. If one concludes that abortion constitutes the taking of innocent human life, then the case for public funding is impossible to justify.