February 3, 2025

Trump Pentagon Dumps Taxpayer-Funded Abortion Travel

It ends a hugely controversial policy that Senator Tommy Tuberville fought courageously since 2023.

By Suzanne Bowdey

President Donald Trump may not have ended all wars on day one, but he has managed to end the one our military never should have been fighting. After almost two years, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday that it would no longer put taxpayers on the hook for our troops’ and their dependents’ abortion travel, ending a hugely controversial policy that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) fought courageously since 2023.

Looking back on that difficult time, the famous coach celebrated having a team in the White House that cares about the rule of law and the unborn. “For the past two years,” he explained, “I have been sounding the alarm about the Pentagon’s illegal and immoral practice of using taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. I took a lot of heat when I stood alone for nearly a year in holding senior Pentagon promotions over this,” Tuberville acknowledged, “but as of today, it was all worth it.”

For Republicans, that may be one of the most gratifying changes the Defense Department has made. For months, the GOP had been trying to nip the DOD’s overreach in the bud through a string of letters, legislation, and ultimately, Tuberville’s one-man crusade to gum up the military promotion process. Regardless of how Americans felt about Joe Biden’s move, the reality — as many argued — is that his administration never had the authority to gift plane and train tickets to women in uniform who wanted to end their unborn child’s life. As Tuberville repeated over and over again, lawmaking is [supposed to be] done over here in Congress. The idea that the DOD was “deciding on their own that they were going to change the abortion policy in our military” is outrageous, the senator contended.

Frankly, Tuberville said, “The Biden administration treated taxpayers like their own personal piggy bank that they could use to bankroll their woke agenda.” He celebrated that the days of trampling the Constitution and destroying innocent lives in our nation’s fighting force are over. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth affirmed today what I’ve been fighting for since I got to Washington: zero taxpayer dollars should go towards abortions. Under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s leadership, the Pentagon will once again be focused on lethality, not pushing a political agenda. Thank God common sense has been restored to our military under President Trump’s leadership.”

Apart from the sheer audacity of the policy, estimates put the cost at somewhere around $1 million a year — money that should have been going to the military’s mission, not taking aim at the unborn.

Mary Szoch, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Human Dignity, was elated by the change. “The Department of Defense is meant to defend and protect Americans and American interests. What a gift it is to once again have a president who wholeheartedly believes this,” she emphasized to TWS, “instead of one who thought that the mission of the U.S. military is to destroy unborn Americans’ lives and pad the wallets of abortionists. We are so grateful to President Trump for his work to defend the unborn, and we are grateful to Coach Tuberville for his tireless efforts fighting against this policy when Biden was in office.”

While there were doubts about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s experience heading into his confirmation hearings, conservatives can’t say enough about his first few days on the job. From scrapping DEI to rolling back abortion policy, the young veteran has taken a sledgehammer to the former commander in chief’s wokeism. As Lt. General (Ret.) William Boykin told TWS, “Secretary Hegseth has wasted no time establishing not only his priorities on readiness but also his priority on properly spending the DOD money which needs to go into equipping and training our military men and women to be warriors and to be ready to go into battle when the time comes.”

Longtime foot soldiers, like Family Research Council’s own Quena Gonzalez, couldn’t say enough about seeing this deadly rule fall by the wayside. “This is a huge win for life and for conscience,” he told TWS, “but it almost didn’t happen. I remember when Senator Tuberville stood almost alone to object to taxpayer funding for abortion travel in the military.” Incredibly, he reminded people, Tuberville “was lectured by Republicans who willingly bought into Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) lie that opposition to taxpayer-funded abortion travel was also opposition to the military officers who were waiting to be confirmed.”

Fortunately for our country, Gonzalez pointed out, “Senator Tuberville had the temerity to come to Congress ready to exercise Senate prerogative on behalf of his voters, and the American people loved it. Two years later, President Trump is delivering on Senator Tuberville’s courageous stand.”

The sad reality of the Democratic Party, he shook his head, is that they persist in “undermining the military by transforming it into a giant social experiment.” When Republicans are at their best, they “focus on winning necessary wars and avoiding what George Washington called ‘entangling alliances.’ Democrats have spent three years excusing a precipitous, disastrously planned, and poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan that scandalized our allies, betrayed our Afghan partners, and betrayed the troops we had sent. Our military’s recruitment levels are dropping as third- and fourth-generation military families tell their sons not to enlist.”

In other words, Quena urged, “We need more, not fewer, men and women like Senator Tuberville.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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