US Bishop Conference Lobbies Congress to Fund Agency Funding Planned Parenthood

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By Michael Hichborn

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) have once again written to Congress requesting "robust funding" for two agencies deeply committed to the promotion and distribution of contraception, one of which provides millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood.

In a December 1, 2017 joint letter to the director for the Office of Management and Budget, and copied to all members of Congress, Abp. Timothy Broglio, the USCCB's chairman for the Committee on International Justice and Peace, and Sean Callahan, the president of Catholic Relief Services, urged Congress to "fully fund" both the President's Emergency Plan for Funding AIDS Research (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (Global Fund).

Despite acknowledging in the letter that both PEPFAR and the Global Fund are highly involved in the distribution of contraception, neither the USCCB nor CRS asks for the cessation of those immoral activities in its bid for Congress to provide American tax dollars to both projects. Key portions of the letter read:

With the approach of World AIDS Day on December 1, we write to urge that the administration's budget request for FY19 fully fund U.S. global HIV and AIDS programs. ...

Although we have principled concerns about those PEPFAR and Global Fund prevention activities we find inconsistent with Catholic teaching and do not implement or advocate for these activities, we support the lifesaving missions of PEPFAR and the Global Fund and urge robust funding for both programs. ...

As you craft the 2019 budget, we urge you to protect HIV and AIDS programs from efforts to reduce funding or to alter the U.S. government's PEPFAR strategy in ways that would diminish the progress we have made.

As we've reported before, PEPFAR is deeply involved in the promotion and distribution of contraception, including abortifacients. For instance, in a section on PEPFAR's website titled, "Linking HIV/AIDS to Women's and Children's Health," PEPFAR makes clear that its work to fight HIV/AIDS includes the promotion and spread of contraception. PEPFAR says:

As part of its overall prevention, care and support, and treatment efforts, PEPFAR is leveraging and linking HIV services to broader delivery mechanisms that improve health outcomes for women and children. Some of these activities include:

• Expanding integration of HIV prevention, care and support and treatment services with family planning and reproductive health services, so that women living with HIV can access necessary care, and so that all women know how to protect themselves from HIV infection.

In 2016, a representative of the USCCB reluctantly admitted that PEPFAR does indeed promote and distribute condoms but claimed that PEPFAR is not permitted to distribute or pay for other forms of contraception.

While PEPFAR is prohibited from directly funding or distributing abortifacient contraception, it establishes a framework for such distribution, allowing other organizations like USAID to provide the contraception to people in PEPFAR projects.

The Global Fund, on the other hand, not only funds the distribution of contraception but actually provides large grants to the world's largest abortion network, Planned Parenthood.

Here are just a few examples of the grant disbursements from the Global Fund to Planned Parenthood affiliates worldwide.

Read the rest at the Lepanto Institute.

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