There is broad bipartisan agreement that the health-care system in the United States is broken. Our country just endured the longest government shutdown ever, and it was largely over health care.
Congressional Democrats wanted to force Congress to expand the Affordable Care Act (commonly called the ACA or Obamacare), even though statistics show the ACA has failed to lower costs in the 15 years since Congress enacted the law. Public opinion polling suggests that more than 40% of Americans are having difficulty paying for their health care. Consequently, the pro-life movement has a historic opportunity to save millions of unborn lives, protect the dignity of countless mothers, and uplift the health of millions by building a pro-life American health-care system.
Few other developments in America could do more to combat abortion and protect unborn lives, uplift the dignity of pregnant mothers, restore the family unit, and revive American greatness than establishing a robust culture of life in health care.
The Affordable Care Act Has Failed
The ACA is a major obstacle to the culture of life because it has become a Trojan horse for expanding abortion, advancing gender ideology, attacking the family unit, and violating religious freedom and conscience rights. Left-wing coalitions in Congress seek the ACA’s expansion to accomplish their dream of socialized medicine, a federally controlled national health-care program. Experiences in Canada and Europe clearly demonstrate that socialized systems lead to radical expansions of abortion and euthanasia.
Catholic Social Thought and Pro-Life Principles
While the pro-life movement should reject legislative efforts to create a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia socialized medical system, it is vital that the pro-life movement offers an alternative pro-life health-care vision and proposal.
Pope St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”) demonstrates that Catholic social thought is an exemplary guide for advancing the common good and human flourishing in the fullness of man’s God-given dignity. Catholic social teaching illuminates a path for a pro-life health-care system that protects the right to life, uplifts the health and dignity of the poor, and provides historic advancements in health-care affordability.
Drawing on Catholic social teaching, seven principles should inform policymakers and the American people about building a health-care system that defends the right to life of all:
- affirming an anthropology based on the scientific biological reality of the person;
- upholding the intrinsic dignity of the person made in the image and likeness of God as a corpore et anima (union of body and soul);
- protecting the right to life of all at every stage of development;
- safeguarding the rights of religious freedom and medical conscience for patients and medical professionals;
- maximizing access to medical care, especially for the poor and most vulnerable;
- promoting patient-centered care that respects human freedom and the right of patients to determine their own medical interventions; and
- empowering solidarity with the poor through subsidiarity, by addressing health-care needs with solutions closest to those most in need.
If our country enacted a pro-life health-care agenda consistent with these principles, we would achieve a pro-life health-care system that protects the unborn and the human person from conception to natural death; provides a substantial social safety net of quality medical care, financial support and community support to pregnant mothers, persons with disabilities, the unemployed, and materially impoverished families; and accomplishes historic reductions in health-care costs through championing patient-centered care and health-care financing.
A 5-Point Framework for a Pro-Life Health-Care System
Equipped with these principles, the pro-life movement, stakeholders focused on rebuilding the family, faith-based communities, and policy makers should enact a robust plan for achieving a pro-life American health-care system.
1. Defund Abortion
Municipalities, state legislatures and Congress should work to permanently defund abortion — including chemical abortions — from local, state and federal tax dollars. To the fullest extent that the law permits, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and state health departments should conduct regulatory action to stop any taxpayer money from going to abortion providers.
2. Strengthen Conscience Rights
Congress and state legislatures should enact legislation strengthening medical conscience rights, inclusive of providing medical professionals with the right to file lawsuits in court if their conscience or religious freedom rights are violated. U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., has introduced excellent federal legislation in the Conscience Rights Act of 2025.
3. Expand Civil Rights Protections
To combat rising passive and active euthanasia, state and federal authorities should implement new civil rights protections to defend the lives of patients who are most vulnerable. Specifically, these new health-care civil rights protections should create increased legal safeguards to stop unjust health-care discrimination against patients with disabilities (including patients in hospice and who are terminally ill), racial or ethnic minorities, the poor, and the elderly.
4. Financially Support Pro-Life Initiatives
To achieve historic gains in patient-centered health-care access and affordability that are truly pro-life, Congress should pass legislation providing monetary support for unemployed, lower-income and other vulnerable Americans to purchase a life-affirming health-care plan of their choosing. Consistent with the Hyde Amendment, such monetary support should be restricted from funding abortion in any way. This idea is largely inspired by the renowned health-care leader Robert Moffitt’s concept of a refundable government tax credit that goes directly to individuals.
By giving taxpayer money back to Americans to purchase a quality life-affirming health-care plan, Congress will empower people to purchase the plan of their choice. The American people know their health-care needs better than the government.
5. Support Pro-Life Hospitals
Federal and state governments should enact legal and regulatory reforms to fully permit pro-life hospital systems, pro-life health-care entities, pro-life pregnancy centers, and religious nonprofits to expand pro-life care. These pro-life organizations are the forefront of caring for, healing and helping the people they serve experience transformation.
Faith communities centered in Christ’s command to love God and neighbor excel at providing care centered in love, healing and community. This Trump administration should issue an executive order promoting religious freedom in health care. This presidential executive order should give religious pro-life health-care entities and religious pro-life nonprofits an equal opportunity to provide health care to the American people.
Similarly, Congress should act to authorize people who practice life-affirming health care sharing to be eligible to open a health savings account. The administration should also use its existing legal authorities to incentivize faith-based pro-life primary care and faith-based mental-health care for the underserved.
This pro-life vision for American health care defends unborn life, shields young people from a culture of death, restores the family, and safeguards the most vulnerable from euthanasia. Implementing this pro-life vision in the policy, practice and financing of health care would be a historic first phase of achieving a culture of life in health care in a post-Dobbs America.
Now is the time for the Church and the pro-life movement to go on offense to protect the unborn, protect young women and men from woke pro-abortion health care, and to take back our nation’s health care for the culture of life.
Louis Brown Jr., JD, is the executive director of the Christ Medicus Foundation.
