The Department of Defense will cover the expenses of abortion-related travel for active-duty service personnel.
In order to “guarantee that our service members can receive reproductive health care and our health care providers can function successfully,” the U.S. Department of Defense will pay for service members to travel outside of their home states for abortions.
Leading Pentagon officials received a message from Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Thursday titled “Ensuring Access to Reproductive Health Care.” In accordance with relevant federal law and operational needs, he ordered the agency to create “travel and transportation allowances for service members and their families.”
The creation of a “common Department of Defense policy that permits acceptable administrative absence according to relevant federal law for non-covered reproductive healthcare” was another recommendation made by him.
According to the memo, “significant numbers of service members and their families may be forced to travel greater distances, take more time off from work, and pay more out of pocket expenses to receive reproductive health care” as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June to permit states to pass laws banning or restricting abortion.
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In Lloyd’s opinion, the capacity of the Department of Defense to “attract, retain, and sustain the readiness of a highly qualified force” would be impacted, in part, as a result of the court’s verdict.
In order to “enable official travel to seek non-covered reproductive health care that is unavailable within the local region of a service member’s regular duty station,” the secretary authorized the modification of “any relevant travel requirements.”
Because of “concerns from many of our service members and their families about the difficulty and ambiguity that they now confront in obtaining reproductive health care, including abortion services,” he claimed that new regulations were required.
We will take the steps described in this message as soon as we can. To the greatest degree practicable, all acts should be performed no later than the end of this calendar year, “the note says. The Department of Defense will keep looking closely at its policies to make sure that it keeps making it easy for people to get reproductive health care in a way that is acceptable and follows federal law.
In a statement, Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a national grass-roots group that supports life, criticized the Pentagon’s new plan.
No matter what laws they have to disobey or rewrite, the Biden administration “would stop at nothing to impose abortion on demand until birth nationwide, paid for by the taxpayers,” she said.
The new letter came out at the same time that other government departments passed rules to protect service members’ access to abortion.
In September, the Biden administration put out an interim final rule that would let VA facilities help service members get abortions even in places where it is illegal to do so.
In an interview with NowThis News that was taped before the weekend and will air this weekend, President Joe Biden said that he agreed with the idea of a government fund for abortion leave.
The March for Life’s Jeanne Mancini said in a statement: “It is heartbreaking to see President Biden is so obsessed with abortion on demand that he is willing to use American tax dollars to push for more abortions rather than offer federal funding for lifesaving options offered by pro-life organizations and maternity homes across the country.”
A federal abortion fund, according to the conservative advocacy organization CatholicVote, would be the equivalent of “government sponsored abortion vacations,” which “would rip tax funds out of the purses of American workers to pay for time off to harm unborn children.”
Govt.-sponsored abortion vacations? President Trump is digging in on his support for abortion and has promised to use American workers’ tax money to pay for time off to kill unborn children. https://t.co/9RLNczfyto
October 20, 2022—CatholicVote.org (@CatholicVote)
After the midterm elections, the president also wants to create a federal abortion right.
As he promised to “codify Roe once and for all,” Biden emphasized the need to elect “more Democratic senators to the United States Senate and more Democrats to preserve control of the House of Representatives” in his speech at the Howard Theatre last week. Days after his inauguration, Biden vowed to urge Congress to codify Roe.
After clearing the Democrat-controlled U.S. House on a party-line vote, the Women’s Health Protection Act, legislation that would create a right to abortion at the federal level, has fallen short of the votes required for passage in the equally split U.S. Senate.
Even though Democrats say that the Women’s Health Protection Act is just a formalization of Roe, pro-life groups say that it would go much further than Roe and give a right to abortion up to birth.
Public opinion polls show that most Americans are against letting abortions happen at any time during the nine-month gestation period.
According to a CBS News survey conducted in May, 17% of Americans said that abortion should be legal at any stage of pregnancy. A Pew Research Center poll done in the same month found that 19% of people support legal abortion in all situations.
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