WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator John Boozman (R-AR) joined 158 of his colleagues in the U.S. House and Senate urging U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to restore the Protect Life Rule and ensure Title X Family Planning Program funding does not support abortion or abortion services.

“We ask you to correct the misguided actions of the previous administration and reimplement the Protect Life Rule to ensure taxpayer dollars are not used to subsidize the abortion industry,” the lawmakers wrote to Kennedy.

The bicameral letter calls on HHS to rescind a Biden-era Title X rule and reinstate a policy implemented during President Trump’s first term that required complete physical and financial separation between federally funded family planning services and abortion-related activities. The pro-life members argued the Biden administration’s changes compromised the integrity of the Title X program and allowed abortion providers to receive taxpayer funding contrary to congressional intent.

The letter was led by Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), chair of the Senate Pro-Life Caucus, along with Representatives Ron Estes (R-KS) and Virginia Foxx (R-NC). In total, 41 senators and 118 members of the House of Representatives signed the letter, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

The full letter is available here and below:

Dear Mr. Secretary,

We write to urge your administration to swiftly propose and finalize the "Compliance with Statutory Program Integrity Requirements" rule, commonly known as the "Protect Life Rule," to restore crucial safeguards to the Title X Family Planning Program. Created by Congress in 1970, Title X of the Public Health Service Act clearly intended to prohibit federal funds from being spent in programs where abortion is a method of family planning. We ask you to correct the misguided actions of the previous administration and reimplement the Protect Life Rule to ensure taxpayer dollars are not used to subsidize the abortion industry.

During President Trump's first administration, the Protect Life Rule successfully fulfilled the spirit and letter of this decades-old law by firmly separating abortion from family planning. The rule appropriately eliminated the egregious abortion referral mandate, which protected the conscience rights of health care providers and increased the potential for diversity among program applicants. Furthermore, it stipulated that Title X projects had to be organized with complete physical and financial separation between a grantee's Title X activities and abortion activities. This much-needed reform ended the practice of "co-location," which had made federal funds vulnerable to misuse and implied that abortion was a method of family planning. The Protect Life Rule also implemented a stronger focus on protecting women and children from being victimized by abuse, rape, incest, and trafficking by bolstering oversight of grantee compliance with state abuse reporting requirements.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration's decision to suspend and revise the Protect Life Rule compromised the integrity of the Title X program. By mandating abortion referrals, the Biden rule effectively required grantees to encourage or promote abortion in order to receive funding, operating exactly opposite to the requirements of the Title X statute. This mandate also directly violated the Weldon Amendment, which makes it illegal for the federal government to discriminate against health care entities that do not refer for abortion. Furthermore, by permitting the "co-location" of abortion clinics and Title X clinics in the same facility, the revised rule provided funding to clinics that perform abortions, allowing them to reallocate financial resources to advance their abortion agenda at the taxpayer's expense. The Biden administration even punished the pro-life states of Oklahoma and Tennessee by stripping their lifesaving Title X funding. Even now, Oklahoma is still waiting for the approximately $9 million Title X funds that were stripped in 2023 and 2024.

History confirms that without the Protect Life Rule, Title X serves as a funding stream for the abortion industry. For example, between 2013 and 2015, Title X funds made up over $170 million of Planned Parenthood's expenditures. Restoring these critical reforms is not without precedent; regulations requiring the physical separation of abortion activities and prohibiting abortion referrals were promulgated under President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1991.