WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is reversing a Biden-era legal guidance that had permitted abortions and related activities to be conducted by arms of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), despite clear prohibition in federal law.
In a December 18 memo from the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the office reversed its 2022 judgment allowing such abortions, which had been issued following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, as part of former President Joe Biden’s “whole of government” effort to preserve abortion “access.”
“In 1992, Congress amended title 38 ‘to improve health care services for women veterans’ and for other purposes,” the memo explains. “With respect to VA’s authority to furnish hospital care and medical services, section 106 of the VHCA made clear that VA could provide ‘[g]eneral reproductive health care’ to women. Id. § 106(a)(3), 106 Stat. at 4947. But Congress carved out from that authority ‘infertility services, abortions, or pregnancy care (including prenatal and delivery care), except for such care relating to a pregnancy that is complicated or in which the risks of complication are increased by a service-connected condition.’ Statutory language thus barred VA’s provision of abortions and limited its provision of pregnancy care to situations that were ‘complicated.’”
It was this language under which the VA’s relevant medical regulations were originally made, specifying a so-called life-of-the-mother exception, yet Biden permitted the VA to “remove the exclusion on abortion counseling and expand the exceptions to the exclusion on abortions for beneficiaries.” Abortions were expanded to cases where “the life or the health of the pregnant veteran would be endangered” (emphasis added), or if the “pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.”
Abortion, the destruction of an innocent unborn child in his mother’s womb, is never medically necessary, and every child has an inviolate right to life, regardless of the circumstances of conception.
“We do not lightly depart from our precedents, and we have given the views expressed in our prior opinion careful and respectful consideration,” the OLC’s latest statement says, quoting itself in a prior case. “But considering ‘the plain language of the statute,” id., we are compelled to conclude that VA may not provide abortions under any provision of chapter 17 of title 38 of the U.S. Code, contrary to the conclusion of our 2022 opinion.”
The VA under the Trump administration had already reversed the Biden policy in August, but requested that OLC issue a formal determination of the legal validity of its previous guidance.
Cutting abortion from taxpayer-funded sources has arguably been the issue on which President Donald Trump’s second term most closely resembles his first. Within weeks of returning to office, Trump began enforcing the Hyde amendment against direct funding of most abortions, reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which forbids non-governmental organizations from using taxpayer dollars for most abortions abroad, and cut millions in pro-abortion subsidies by freezing U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending.
In March, the Trump administration froze Title X “family planning” grants to nonprofits it said violated its executive orders on immigration and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in nine states.
In July, Trump signed into law his controversial “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB), a wide-ranging policy package that includes a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to any that provides abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life.
Earlier this month, records from the U.S. military’s TRICARE health service program indicated that abortions among members of the military and their families have dropped to a five-year low.
