Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), with help from two female Republican colleagues, is attempting to overturn President Trump’s ban on overseas abortion funding (otherwise known as the Mexico City Policy).
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joined Shaheen in passing the Senate Appropriations Committee’s amendment in a 16-15 vote. These same two U.S. senators were instrumental in “voting to kill the ‘skinny repeal’ of Obamacare in order to protect the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood,” writes Townhall.
Townhall goes on to note:
Shaheen’s amendment would limit any future president’s ability to ban abortion funding overseas and would reinstate U.S. funding of the United Nations Population Fund which the Trump administration ended in April in a separate policy citing its participation in forced abortion and sterilization.
In April, Live Action News reported that President Trump had “cut off funding from the United States to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) ‘on the basis that the UNFPA’s activities in China are complicit with that nation’s coercive population control program, the implementation of which includes forced abortion and involuntary sterilization.'”
According to Shaheen’s office, her amendment “was added to the State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs annual appropriations bill that allocates federal dollars for programs directed by the US State Department.”
StatNews.com reports that the amendment is “a move likely to prove only symbolic.” According to Townhall, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) believes the same, saying, “This is the same debate we have every year, probably with the same outcome.” Graham also stated that the U.S. House would keep the ban on overseas abortion funding in place.
Depending on which political party holds the presidency, the Mexico City Policy is regularly reinstituted (by Republican presidents) and rescinded (Democrats).
