Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on remarks made by Rep. Nancy Pelosi on October 26:
Rep. Nancy Pelosi spoke at the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus on October 26 urging her colleagues to overturn President Trump’s rollback of the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate. She supports a new bill, the Protect Access to Birth Control Act, that restores funding for services provided by the HHS mandate.
Pelosi called the Trump rollback “outrageous,” saying it was a “cruel decision.” She did not say why it was cruel to make women pay for their own birth control pills.
She even went so far as to say that “No women should be made to choose between obtaining contraceptives and paying for groceries.” Why not? More to the point, why is it “outrageous” to require women to choose between buying pills or potatoes? They do that now, don’t they?
More important, Pelosi once again misrepresented the HHS mandate.
Pelosi focused her entire statement on birth control. She never once indicated that the HHS mandate forces the public to pay for abortion-inducing drugs. She also personalized the subject, bringing her children into it.
“I have five children,” she said. “When I took my baby home from the hospital, my fifth child, my oldest child was turning six that week—that week. God blessed us, it was glorious and the rest. That doesn’t mean that is the way it should go for anybody else. Women and families should have that determination.”
It is nice to know that Pelosi opted to allow her children to be born. Regrettably, as a public policy matter she is not prepared to extend that right to all children.
Pelosi’s enthusiasm for abortion is objectionable enough, but she throws more coals on the fire every time she invokes her religion. Pelosi is a dissident Catholic: she rejects the Church’s teaching on an issue branded “intrinsically evil” by the Catechism. Now, in her statement attacking the president, she added to her assault on the religious liberty rights of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Don’t those women’s rights count?
Pro-abortion and anti-religious liberty. Those are two of Nancy Pelosi’s most defining characteristics.
