Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called last year's cutoff a "historic victory," crediting Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), and the pro-life majority in Congress for delivering it. She is now urging lawmakers to pass a second reconciliation bill making the defunding permanent before the clock runs out on Independence Day. National Right to Life has joined the call, warning that Medicaid dollars will again subsidize an organization whose core business is abortion.
Research released this month by the Charlotte Lozier Institute found that eleven states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington — have already moved to backfill Planned Parenthood's lost federal revenue, committing at least $202.5 million in supplemental state funding since the ban took effect. At the same time, 57 Planned Parenthood clinics across 20 states have closed or consolidated since January 2025, a trend pro-life advocates cite as proof the defunding was doing its work.
Unless Congress acts before July 4, the restriction simply sunsets. No vote is required to bring it back — only silence, and the passage of a date on the calendar.
What a Budget Line Cannot Decide
Set aside the appropriations language for a moment, my friend, and look at what is actually being argued over. Not a program. Not a line item. A child, at the earliest and most defenseless hour of his life, and whether the government of the United States will hand money to the business that ends him. Congress can phrase it in the driest terms it wants — reimbursement rates, reconciliation windows, sunset clauses — but underneath the language sits a soul God knit together before anyone in Washington ever heard his name.
Scripture does not leave this in doubt. The child in the womb is not potential life waiting on a committee vote. He is life, known and formed by the hand of God.
"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)
David did not write that as poetry about someone else's baby. He wrote it about himself, looking back at the womb and seeing God's hands already at work there. That is the claim the pro-life cause has always rested on, and no expiring statute changes it one way or the other. Jeremiah heard much the same word: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee" (Jeremiah 1:5). Before Congress, before Medicaid, before any nation existed to argue about it — God knew.
A tax provision can lapse. A budget can be rewritten next session or the one after. What cannot be rewritten is the worth God assigned to the child before the child ever drew breath. Believers can and should press their representatives to protect that worth in law — that is honest, faithful citizenship, not partisanship. But the deeper work does not belong to any Congress. It belongs to the church, to the pregnancy center down the street, to the neighbor who opens her home to a frightened young mother instead of leaving the choice to a clinic's waiting room. Laws can restrain evil for a season; only the gospel changes a heart toward the child inside the womb.
So give thanks for every lawmaker who stands for the unborn, and pray for those who do not yet see what David saw in the womb — that the hand forming that child is not the state's, and not even the mother's alone, but God's. That is a truth no expiration date can touch.