Beginning July 5, Planned Parenthood affiliates became eligible again for Medicaid reimbursement, funding that pro-life organizations estimate at $800 million or more annually. During the year the funding was cut off, 20 Planned Parenthood clinics closed nationwide, and affiliates reported dispensing about 25 percent fewer packs of birth control and performing roughly 20 percent fewer breast cancer screenings than the year before.
Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, called the lapse a "moral failure" and urged President Trump and Congress to act quickly to restore and extend the defunding. Kelsey Pritchard, communications director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told OSV News on July 6 that her organization is asking the House and Senate to fold a similar provision into a third reconciliation bill lawmakers hope to pass before the midterm elections. "This is really now the default expectation from the pro-life movement that they do this again," Pritchard said, adding that the outcome remains uncertain given disagreements within the party's slim congressional majorities over what else the package should contain.
Live Action has scheduled a Nationwide Day of Prayer for July 16, calling pro-life Americans to intercede over the funding fight. Planned Parenthood's political arm, meanwhile, has launched a $2 million campaign targeting pro-life lawmakers in competitive districts across Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania.
What a Nation Owes the Child It Cannot See
Behind the dollar figures and the district maps sits a question no reconciliation bill can settle: what does a nation owe the child it cannot see? Congress can write a sunset clause into a budget. It cannot write one into the conscience. The law may expire. The command does not.
Scripture does not treat the unborn as a policy category. It treats the child in the womb as a person already known, already named, already loved by the God who formed him.
"If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain;" (Proverbs 24:11)
That is not a suggestion. It is a charge laid on every man and woman who claims to fear God. The Lord does not ask whether the ones drawn toward death are convenient, or planned, or affordable. He asks only whether you will forbear — whether you will look away and call it someone else's business. My friend, it is not someone else's business. The psalmist wrote, "For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). Before a committee ever votes and before a check is ever cut, God has already done His work of knitting that child together in secret.
So the funding fight in Washington matters, and Christians are right to care how their tax dollars are spent. But no vote in this life will finish the deliverance those unborn children need, and no defeat in Congress cancels the deliverance a soul needs from sin and death. That deliverance was bought once, on a cross, by a Savior who did not forbear — who did not look away from a dying world but came all the way down into it to save it.
If you have walked through an abortion, hear this plainly: the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses, and there is no sin so heavy that grace cannot lift it off you. And if you have never given your life to Christ, this is the hour to do it. Every earthly battle — Medicaid, courtrooms, campaign dollars — is a shadow of the bigger fight for the souls of men. Christ died to win that fight, and He is still winning it today, one heart at a time. Do not forbear from Him.