The Health Department's Christian Crusade
From Rolling Stone:
The Health Department’s Christian Crusade
The religious right has infiltrated the office of Health and Human Services, and reproductive rights are the first target
By TESSA STUART
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Conventional wisdom — at least since 2016, when candidate Donald Trump bluntly declared his intention to appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade — has held that the gravest threat to reproductive freedom in the United States would come, eventually, from the Supreme Court. But while the focus has been on the judicial branch, officials in the executive have been quietly writing the constitutionally protected right to an abortion out of federal rules and grant guidelines. Today, the ability of low-income women to secure an abortion is poised to disappear even before the next challenge to Roe lands before the court — and for immigrant girls in ORR custody whether it still exists at all is a matter of some debate.
The Department of Health and Human Services is a sprawling agency with a trillion-dollar budget and nearly a dozen operating divisions, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the government-run health programs Medicare and Medicaid. It has a hand in everything from funding preschool programs and regulating vitamins to identifying Superfund sites and monitoring Ebola outbreaks.
During the Obama administration, no area of the federal government was more reviled by the religious right than HHS. Viewed by religious Republicans as the primary staging ground for the administration’s assaults on “faith” and “freedom,” HHS was assailed for implementing rules that expanded hospital visitation rights to same-sex couples, protected transgender patients from discrimination and required employers to offer birth-control coverage.
It was a coup, then, when Trump installed pious orthopedic surgeon Tom Price as secretary, who, with the help of the office of Vice President Mike Pence, began stocking the department with an army of culture-war veterans plucked from the country’s most radical religious organizations — the archconservative Family Research Council, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Americans United for Life, and the National Abstinence Education Association among them. By the time Price was forced to step down over a spending scandal last September, HHS had already been transformed into what the Family Research Council called “a virtual promise-keeping factory” for Christian conservatives. .....(more)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/health-and-human-services-abortion-policies-738904/
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