Aborting Africans with Your Tax Dollars

Ballooning inflation, high gas prices, a looming recession—it’s the 1970s all over again.

Even today’s abortion fights recall the era of disco. In 1973, the Supreme Court foisted novel abortion “rights” on the country in Roe v. Wade, leading Congress to pass the Helms Amendment (not to be confused with the similar Hyde Amendment) to the Foreign Assistance Act a few months later. The amendment bars U.S. foreign aid from being used to fund abortions as “a method family planning” abroad. Back then, the amendment had bipartisan support, passing the Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

How things change. With Roe gone, the activist Left is gunning for anything standing in the way of their extreme anti-life agenda—including the Helms Amendment.

Repeal Helms

Senate Democrats introduced legislation to codify abortions as “a critical component of comprehensive maternal and reproductive care” in U.S. foreign aid, effectively overturning the “racist” Helms Amendment.

Leading the charge is Repeal Helms, a coalition quietly led by the abortion advocacy group Ipas, according to its web domain registration.

Ipas is one of the Left’s biggest lobbies, spending $67 million in 2020 alone, much of it to expand abortion access in Africa and Asia. The group invented manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) technology to perform “uterine evacuations”—literally sucking out embryos and fetuses from the womb—which is marketed in over 100 countries.

Another 180 or so feminist, pro-abortion, and left-wing advocacy groups are part of the Repeal Helms Coalition, such as the evocatively named SlutWalk and EngenderHealth (formerly the Sterilization League of New Jersey). George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center, Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, and the Center for American Progress have also endorsed the campaign.

Other notables include:

• Population Council, the eugenic movement’s think tank, created in 1952 to address global “overpopulation” with funding from John D. Rockefeller III;
• Population Institute, which also supports global depopulation to save the planet;
• Population Connection Action Fund, founded in 1968 as “Zero Population Growth” by Paul Ehrlich, author of the infamous (and wildly wrong) scare-book The Population Bomb;
• Population Action International, created as the “Population Crisis Committee” in 1965 and today a supporter of abortion expansion everywhere;
• Population Services International, a “family planning” and abortion organization with strong ties to the founders of Marie Stopes International;
• Marie Stopes International, a British abortion provider named for a famous eugenicist, which has been caught performing—and boasting of—illegal abortions in Africa;
• NARAL Pro-Choice America, one of the top abortion lobbies and a pillar of the Democratic Party;
• National Abortion Federation, the official professional association for abortion practitioners;
• Abortion Access Front (formerly Lady Parts Justice League), a “pop-up” campaign run by the Arabella Advisors “dark money” network and the pass-through giant NEO Philanthropy;
• Pathfinder International, a little-known funder of abortions overseas backed by federal funds, founded by a close Margaret Sanger ally in 1957;
• Advocates for Youth, which protests the confirmation of conservative Supreme Court justices in the name of helping America’s children;
• Catholics for Choice, which calls abortion a “moral and legal right” in defiance of standing Roman Catholic teaching;
• Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, a leftist interfaith advocacy group that divinizes sexual immorality and opposes the biblical definition of marriage;
• Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the Trump administration in 2018 for overturning President Obama’s mandate that employers pay for abortifacients and contraception;
• Feminist Majority and Foundation, which also support the Democrats’ expansive changes to voting and elections;
• Ultraviolet, an LGBTQ advocacy group;
• Sierra Club, one of the nation’s top eco-activist groups and radically opposed to all “fossil fuel” energy and nuclear power; and
• Friends of the Earth, founded in 1969 by famed eco-activist David Brower and one of the leading proponents of the Green New Deal—a policy it believes doesn’t go far enough.

One Donor

Amazingly, many of these groups share a common mega-donor: the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, itself bankrolled by billionaire investor Warren Buffett. I’ve estimated that between 2000 and 2020 the Buffett Foundation poured close to $5 billion into pro-abortion groups. That’s enough to pay for nearly 4 million 20-week abortions, according to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute, the Left’s top pro-abortion think tank.

The Future of Abortion Access

This isn’t the first effort to repeal the Helms Amendment. Democrats introduced similar bills in 2020 and again in 2021, neither of which advanced out of the House.

As for the original author of the amendment, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC)—a staunchly conservative Democrat until switching parties in 1970—also introduced legislation in 1973 to amend the U.S. Constitution to recognize a right to life “from the moment of conception,” though the bill didn’t go very far. Interestingly, Helms chaired the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee until 2001, when he retired and was succeeded by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE).

History will prove whether this marks the beginning of a new era of radical abortion access or is merely a half-hearted Parthian shot by a diminishing political party.