In an article earlier this week on Antony Blinken, Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Reuters deployed an interesting turn of phrase to describe one aspect of the incoming administration’s foreign policy:
Biden has vowed to rejoin a nuclear deal with Iran if the country returns to compliance, return to the Paris climate accord, abandon plans to leave the World Health Organization and end a U.S. rule that bans funding of aid groups that discuss abortion. [Emphasis added.]
That last clause refers to the Mexico City policy, which I wrote about in a Corner post last week. Though you wouldn’t be able to glean it from this bit of reporting from Reuters, the policy actually prohibits U.S. agencies from giving foreign-aid money to groups that perform abortions overseas or dispense their resources to promote an increase in elective abortion around the globe.
Perhaps performing or promoting abortion involves some element of “discussion,” but the main purpose of the Mexico City policy is to ensure that U.S. taxpayers aren’t forced to fund groups that will turn around and spend aid money on increasing the number of global abortions. Pretending that the policy is a puritanical effort to clamp down on “discussing abortion” is merely an attempt to evade or obscure that fact.