PEPFAR Was Used to Promote Abortion in Africa, Overturn Pro-Life Laws

It’s an issue that’s rocketed to the attention of everyone from Hollywood elites to Silicon Valley. Names like Bono and Bill Gates have used their significant capital to demand that a George W. Bush-era project be spared from the reforms it desperately needs. On stage at Otter Creek Church, even Christian singer Amy Grant pulled out her phone to dial the Washington office of Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) in front of the audience. “We want you to know that here in Nashville, we want to see full funding of PEPFAR,” she said, “so that we can stay on track to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic…” There’s just one problem: there’s no reason to believe that the program — at least in its current form — can.

PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was the brainchild of the 43rd president at a time when the disease was ravaging the African population. The idea was a good one 20-plus years ago, especially since the continent had no plan to educate or treat people affected by the out-of-control spread, which was largely the result of a lot of promiscuous sex. At the time, Family Research Council successfully lobbied to put the bulk of the prevention dollars into an ABC approach, emphasizing abstinence (“A”) and being faithful (“B”) first, then, as a last resort, condoms (“C”).

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By 2023, PEPFAR had earned the distinction of being “the most substantial governmental effort to address a single disease in American history.” In 22 years, FRC’s Arielle Del Turco points out, “the U.S. government had dedicated more than $100 billion to PEPFAR, and the State Department credits the program with providing life-saving care to 25 million people.”

But while the project was initially focused on saving lives, the PEPFAR of today is a far cry from the humanitarian relief it was under Bush. Gradually, Democrats chipped away at the heart of the work — eventually ditching the ABC model and turning the expensive aid into a weapon of radical pro-abortion, LGBT advocacy. At one point, under Barack Obama, the administration relaxed the rules so much that groups promoting prostitution and sex trafficking became eligible for U.S. dollars. It was an ironic twist, since those dark industries were fueling the very problem that Bush wanted to fight. But it managed to make one thing clear: how insincere the far-Left was about ending the epidemic and how genuine they were about exploiting Africa’s crisis to push their Sexual Revolution.

It was under Joe Biden that the plans to turn PEPFAR into a slush fund for Democrats’ radical social agenda really exploded. In September of 2022, the 44th president made the overhaul complete, releasing a document called “Reimagining PEPFAR’s Strategic Direction.” All throughout the publication, “the Biden administration envisions abortion and contraception as essential to PEPFAR’s work,” Del Turco emphasizes. “Additionally,” the paper goes on to note, “PEPFAR will collaborate with partners to dismantle the social and structural barriers that hold back progress in the global HIV response by addressing equity for women and girls, and LGBTQI+ persons around the world.”

At the end of May, President Trump asked Congress to claw back $400 million in PEPFAR funding as part of his rescissions package. The effort, the administration explained, is “eliminate only those programs that neither provide life-saving treatment nor support American interests.” Rescission is a tool that allows the executive branch to ask Congress to rescind previously-approved spending that is not needed. In this case, the president’s request noted that “[t]his rescission proposal aligns with the Administration’s efforts to eliminate wasteful foreign assistance programs,” and that “[e]nacting the rescission would restore focus on health and life spending.” Far from eliminating AIDS relief in foreign aid, the president’s request points out that $6 billion was appropriated for the program for this year, and that doesn’t account for billions of dollars that have been carried over, unspent, from previous years.

Del Turco, who joined Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” to debunk some of these mainstream lies about these modest PEPFAR reforms, pointed out that Trump’s predecessor “was specifically asking for this type of [pro-abortion, LGBT] programming. And some of it just goes under the radar,” she explained, “because we’re looking at a massive program, and it’s hard to keep track of absolutely everything. So we need to be putting clear guardrails on it. And when we can, we need to be defunding the programs that are specifically woke, which I think these rescissions try to do.”

And the reality is, Trump’s rescissions don’t eliminate the program. You’d assume from all of the celebrity-level hysteria that the president is suggesting tossing aid entirely. Far from it. It isn’t even a haircut, Perkins quipped. “This would only cut $400 million from [the woke parts of the program],” Del Turco clarified. “However, it would leave available $10 billion — with a ‘B’ — for PEPFAR. So all of the good things that PEPFAR does, like life-saving treatments, providing life-saving drugs for free to very needy countries — that would still be occurring even under these rescissions.”

And yet, activists are staging die-ins over roughly 5% of PEPFAR’s funding without any curiosity about the facts. Even Christians are taking the bait, thanks to social justice warriors like Russell Moore, who contend — with a basketful of hyperbole — that the church is somehow complicit in African cruelty if we don’t preserve woke, taxpayer-funded garbage like pastry cooking classes for male prostitutes or funding for a lesbian justice institute in Canada.

Still, Moore told The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, “PEPFAR should be an easy call for evangelical Christians. It affirms human dignity and the sanctity of life in ways easily within the reach and responsibility of our country. It is hard to know whether the glee for destroying one of the most effective and successful moral reforms American evangelicals have ever supported is more sadism, cruelty for cruelty’s sake, or masochism.”

What about the cruelty of underwriting widespread abortion in gross violation of the host countries’ deeply held beliefs? Or using these dollars to bully and lobby leaders into changing their pro-life laws, as several NGOs were caught doing? If anyone truly cares about Africa, then they’d recognize that these reforms are exactly what several countries asked for. Wehner, who helped lobby President Bush for PEPFAR, should know better.

African religious leaders are setting the record straight, even if elite evangelicals in the U.S. are obscuring it. “As you now seek to reauthorize PEPFAR funding,” dozens of the nations’ representatives wrote to Congress in 2023, “we want to express our concerns and suspicions that this funding is supporting so-called family planning and reproductive health principles and practices, including abortion, that violate our core beliefs concerning life, family, and religion. We ask that PEPFAR remain true to its original mission and respect our norms, traditions, and values,” they implored. “We ask that those partner organizations with whom the U.S. government partners to implement PEPFAR programs in ways that are cognizant and respectful of our beliefs and not cross over into promoting divisive ideas and practices that are not consistent with those of Africa.”

What matters here isn’t Amy Grant’s opinion or Russell Moore’s, it’s the African people’s. If they’re frustrated by the cultural imperialism unleashed by the Democrats through PEPFAR, shouldn’t we be? Not to mention, as Max Primorac’s excellent piece in The Hill points out, their leaders aren’t a bit concerned about this change’s impact on PEPFAR’s overall effectiveness. “South Africa, the top PEPFAR recipient, declared, ‘It is inconceivable that out of [billions] spent on HIV/AIDS programmes, the withdrawal of [$400 million] by President Trump will immediately lead to the collapse of the entire programme.’”

If 300,000 people have died due to spending cuts, as U2’s Bono claimed, wouldn’t Africa have said so? And what, exactly, are we suggesting about these nations if we think they can’t possibly survive without America?

“I think we’re really undermining these countries’ ability to take care of themselves when we [say], ‘Oh, without this $400 million, you guys are all going to die,’” Del Turco underscored. “That’s just not true. And these countries have learned a lot as the program has been enacted in their countries. These people have learned how to treat people,” she insisted. “And we need to allow them to take ownership of this,” Perkins agreed.

That’s not to say Americans should throw up their hands and walk away from a quarter-century investment. But if these annoyingly loud critics actually listened to someone other than the mainstream media or Hollywood, they’d know that’s not what Republicans are suggesting. This is a surgical reduction of the program that’s been used to advance anti-family, anti-life projects. And clearly, the biggest complainers are the fat-cat organizations whose bottom lines are threatened.

“The real driver of this campaign is the foreign aid industry,” Primorac stressed, “which currently stands to lose billions in taxpayer funding. Both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives recently ripped the foreign aid industry for its high overhead charges, which sometimes exceed 50 percent of their total grants. Republican lawmakers considering this manufactured hysteria must be made to understand that 98 percent of political donations from the PEPFAR industry go to Democrats. Know that a big chunk of that $6.5 billion annual congressional gift is being used against your re-election campaign.”

As far as he’s concerned, 4-6% in cuts is a pittance compared to the massive overhaul the program needs. PEPFAR “has created an African cadre of experts that can operate HIV programs themselves — without the bureaucratic bloat of the PEPFAR industry. By working directly with African churches, which are the core of medical care in Africa (as in the U.S.), Congress could cut PEPFAR’s cost by half, improve delivery effectiveness through local partners, and empower Africans to take ownership of a program that should be transitioned to them anyway.”

LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.

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