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The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the USCCB Committee on Pro-life Activities chairman this week praised a policy proposal to reinstate a long-standing Department of Veterans Affairs rule that ensured abortion was not covered by VA and civilian dependents’ health benefits.
“The women and men who served our country, to defend innocent life, deserve quality health care and supportive resources, not the violence of abortion. Veterans’ health facilities must not be places of death, but places of great hope,” Archbishop Timothy Broglio and Bishop Daniel Thomas said in an Aug. 5 statement. “We are grateful that the Department of Veterans Affairs is stepping up to protect preborn children and families once again from taxpayer-funded, elective abortion, and look forward to reviewing the new proposed rule in full.”
The Aug. 4 proposal aims to end the Biden administration’s 2022 approval for abortions to be covered by taxpayers as part of military benefits and abortions at military hospitals. Before the Biden administration’s action, the new proposal says that the ban on funding abortion through VA benefits “had been firmly in place since the medical benefits package was first established in 1999,” as CatholicVote previously reported.
The Biden administration removed the previous pro-life policy soon after the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization against the previous decision Roe v. Wade. The day that the court’s ruling was made public, President Joe Biden promised an “all-of-government” campaign in favor of abortion.
This statement is not Archbishop Broglio’s first comment on the matter. CatholicVote reported that he released a statement Aug. 4 in his capacity as Archbishop for the Military Services, USA, in which he directly thanked both the VA secretary and President Donald Trump.
“I am deeply grateful to VA Secretary Doug Collins and President Trump for returning to the prior policy that prohibits the use of federal funds to end the life of the preborn in the womb,” Archbishop Broglio said in his previous statement. “It is only fitting that an agency established to care for those who so often put their lives on the line to defend the innocent is freed from participation in procedures that do not support innocent life.”
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