Weighing in on federal budget, bishops' pro-life chairman welcomes defunding of abortion, laments IVF (USCCB)

In a recent letter to leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees, the chairman of the US bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities weighed in on budgetary priorities.

“We are profoundly grateful to the House of Representatives for working together to defund the abortion industry in the reconciliation bill,” said Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo, Ohio. “Though the USCCB has serious concerns about other parts of that legislation, the provision addressing taxpayer funding for abortion providers is a tremendous stride forward.”

The prelate strongly encouraged Congress “to complement and enhance the Administration’s ongoing efforts to rectify the overreaches of the prior Administration that aggressively promoted elective abortion.”

After calling for “improvements and investments” in federal programs for families, and acknowledging the pain of infertile couples, Bishop Thomas spoke out against IVF, which “represents an underregulated industry that creates hundreds of thousands or even millions of preborn children who will be lost in attempts to implant them within a mother, interminably frozen, or discarded and killed (often in a selective, eugenic manner).”