What to expect from the new pro-life Congress

By Jill Stanek Tuesday’s election garnered at least 53 new pro-life votes in the House. Conversely, only 151 winning House … Continued

by Jill Stanek

By Jill Stanek

Tuesday’s election garnered at least 53 new pro-life votes in the House. Conversely, only 151 winning House candidates were endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action, meaning just 34.7 percent of the 435 representatives in the 212th Congress will be reliable pro-abortion votes.

Ideologically, the incoming pro-lifers, all Republican, will mesh well with their solidly pro-life leadership (John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy, Thad McCotter, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, John Carter, and Pete Sessions).

Committee and chairperson appointments should reflect the Republican Party’s longstanding commitment to defend life, particularly appointments to the Appropriations and Energy and Commerce Committees.

In conjunction, I expect the funding stream initiated by the current Congress via healthcare and appropriations to Planned Parenthood, the United States’ largest abortion provider, to be turned off. Republicans have also promised to strip funding of Obamacare, which includes federal funding for abortions, while they work on repealing it.

Speaking of Planned Parenthood, I think Congressman Pence’s bill, the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act,” which would ensure tax dollars don’t go to organizations that commit abortion, stands an excellent chance of passing the next session.

And speaking of repealing, one pro-life need that became pressingly clear through the fight over Obamacare was to codify the Hyde Amendment, which must be approved annually, into permanent law. The “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” introduced by Congressmen Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Dan Lipinski (D-IL), would ensure a permanent government-wide ban on taxpayer funding of abortion.

Another action I anticipate the pro-life majority to take will be to restore the ban against locally and federally funded abortions in the District of Columbia, which was gutted by the Obama regime and current Congress. This may set up for the first showdown between Republicans and the President.

I hope the voting card constituents have given new strongly pro-life members will give current pro-abortion members pause to reconsider two looming pro-life concerns during the lame duck session: Their threat to permanently ban any president from instituting the Mexico City policy, which stops international abortion groups from getting U.S. funding, and their threat to turn military hospitals into abortion mills.

One opportunity the new pro-life Congress will have is addressing unsafe telemed abortions, wherein abortionists dispense RU-486 abortion pills via computer to patients sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Pro-lifers have the same sense as the rest of America: that Republicans are being granted a two-year probationary period to stand tall on their platform, both fiscally and socially, after they admittedly lost their way in the 2000s. I am confident the GOP establishment has gotten the message. With the surge of active pro-lifers stepping into Congress to bolster them, and also knowing the majority of Americans are now pro-life, I am optimistic they will do their best in their political capacities to protect the most innocent among us, preborn children.

Jill Stanek, is an RN and a prominent anti-abortion writer and activist.

More On Faith and politics:
Catholic America: The disappearing abortion issue
Muqtedar Khan: Sharia Law banned in Oklahoma
Jordan Sekulow: We’re back: Christian conservatives swarm Congress
Albert Mohler: New political equation for religious right
Under God: Debate over religious factor in election begins

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  • WmarkW

    They SAID this was about taxes and jobs.Stop making conservatism look bad by claiming that your government intrusions are part of an ideology of freedom.

  • jemoorman

    “Government Intrusions?” Spare Me! This government has been nothing but intrusive. Time to take their hands off of our throats and out of our pockets, and their knives off of the unborn. No more funding for morally bankrupt social programs, bailouts of political patrons and the systematic genocidal destruction of the weakest members of our society.

  • APaganplace

    Ain’t it the truth, WmarkW. They *said* a lot of things which weren’t true the *last* time, either, of course. You know what they say about getting ‘fooled twice,’ …what are they up to, now, five times?Sure didn’t take long for the “Take ‘Back’ Government” crowd to whip out the wedge issues and start trying to cram big government into womens’ wombs. Stay tuned for more obstructionism while Wall Street loots even more and the Christian Right blames it on sex and not being more Dominionist some more.

  • stevie7

    The religious right should stop claiming to be ‘pro-life’. They aren’t. The label should only be ‘anti-abortion’ as many republicans fully support the death penalty.Of course, we all know that no meaningful progress will be made on this issue because how else would the republicans manage to get the votes of the ‘single-issue’ electorate.

  • mojosan

    With your logic Stevie7, then the secular left should stop using the word “pro-choice” because clearly if they were pro-choice, they would respect the right to choose of people to be religious or pro-life or to take a different position than them on the death penalty.And of course if pro-lifers are hypocritical for supporting the death penalty (which actually is not true of all of us) then abortion advocates who oppose the death penalty are hypocrites too – if you respect the right to choose, why don’t you respect the right to choose of voters to punish murderers?Besides, the real issue is should we treat guilty people the same as innocent people? If the unborn are people, they are innocent and we shouldn’t kill them even if society decides that guilty murders should undergo the death penalty.The argument that pro-lifers are so stupid to elect Republicans who won’t do anything on abortion because they want to keep winning our votes is ridiculous. No one who does pro-life work wants to do it – we need to do it because innocent lives are at stake. Perhaps you need to understand our arguments before you rely on such bad thinking.

  • gdalfonzo

    Excellent piece, Jill.

  • joe_allen_doty

    Earlier this year, I talked to a woman who works with an Assembly of God congregation that has a program for unwed mothers. She stupidly believes that it is not God’s will for a woman or girl to be raped or a victim of incest… …But she believes it is God’s will if the woman or girl gets pregnant. And the woman or girl must give birth to the baby. I don’t approve of using abortion as a means of birth control but, a woman has a God given right to do whatever she wants with what is in her body. I am actually pro-WHOLE life which contradicts what most anti-abortion folks believe. They rarely care what happens to the child after he or she is born and they don’t care about the child’s mother either.

  • dwt301

    What should you expect from this “pro-life Congress”? Exactly what you got from your last “pro-life Congress” – nothing. Your so-called pro-life politicians have had countless opportunities over the past decades to ban abortion and they don’t. Why? Because a) they know the majority of the American people would never allow it and b) it allows them to keep getting money and support from willing simpletons like yourself.

  • fraudbust2011

    People keep raising the canard about pro-lifers — if they don’t support X, y and z big government anti-poverty giveaway programs, then they aren’t really “prolife.” Okay, we should care equally about babies after birth. Fine. If there is a clinic where they are torn limb from limb after birth, as they are at Planned Parenthood clinics before birth, then we will want to close that clinic. Do you see how ridiculous this proabortion line is??