A group of over 50 pro-life organizations and individuals signed a joint letter to Alex Azar, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), urging him to use whatever emergency powers he has at his disposal to require abortion clinics to stop performing elective abortions and join in the collective national effort to combat the coronavirus. 

Officials with Susan B. Anthony List, Students for Life of America, March for Life, National Right to Life, Concerned Women for America and the Family Policy Alliance, among many other of the letter’s signatories, explained the issue this way:

“While surgery centers postpone elective and diagnostic procedures, abortion centers are churning out surgical and chemical abortions and putting women, especially the poor, at risk,” the letter states. “Their continued operation depletes sorely needed personal protective equipment and leads to complications that will further overwhelm already overextended emergency rooms.”

The letter outlines what the pro-life groups would like Secretary Azar and HHS to do:

“The abortion industry is compounding one crisis with another. Therefore, we urge public officials to use their broad emergency authority to safeguard against the extreme abortion agenda by: 

  • Ensuring that emergency response funds are not diverted to the abortion industry; 
  • Urging the abortion industry to cease operations and join healthcare providers in donating their PPE and other equipment to coronavirus response; 
  • Ensure that telemedicine abortion is not expanded during the crisis and maintain FDA limits on dispensing of chemical abortion; 
  • Continue actions to stop illegal mail-order sale of chemical abortion; and 
  • Promote medically accurate and supportive information for women that counters the inaccurate and exploitative messaging coming from an abortion industry all too happy to use the current pandemic to scare women and families into abortion.

The Daily Citizen reached out to one of the signatories, Autumn Leva, Vice President of Strategy for the Family Policy Alliance. We asked her why she signed on to the group letter. 

“I have a newborn at home and beloved grandparents who have not yet met their first great-grandchild—nor will they likely be able to anytime soon,” Leva stated in an email. “The coronavirus is impacting every American family in some way. We’re all making sacrifices to “flatten the curve,” save the lives of loved ones, and ease the burden on healthcare workers who are on the front lines fighting the virus.

But Leva is concerned there is one industry that is ignoring the call to national sacrifice and is out for its own gain.

“Family Policy Alliance believes it’s time for federal and state leaders to put a stop to the powerful abortion lobby’s push to always be the exception to the rule,” she explained. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers have long argued that they shouldn’t have to follow the same basic medical standards of care as other outpatient surgical centers. Now they are pushing to continue ending lives for profit while the rest of the country fights and sacrifices to save them. President Trump’s Health Secretary and the states’ governors have the power to protect the front lines fighting the Coronavirus from the abortion lobby, and they should exercise it.”

Several states have ordered medical professionals to postpone all elective surgeries in an effort to conserve medical supplies and keep the health care industry free to concentrate on stopping COVID-19. The response has not, in all cases, been either patriotic or compassionate. In one such state, Ohio, Planned Parenthood has responded with a defiant “business as usual” approach, stating that they will continue to do abortions and still (somehow) comply with the state’s order to conserve all personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to fight the coronavirus. 

How does that work, Planned Parenthood, as you continue to use up PPE – gowns, masks, etc. –  in your own procedures, roughly 340,000 abortions per year across the nation? And when you send hurting women to emergency rooms with medical complications from your efforts, how will that help the nation fight the pandemic? Your efforts to keep killing babies during a national health emergency will result in post-abortive women taking up beds and the time of exhausted medical personnel to focus on the emergencies you create. How will that benefit anyone or anything other than your bottom line.

It’s time we look at the ugly realities of abortion and come to a national consensus about those who commit abortions. Their actions speak louder than words.