The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the large budget bill that has been passing through the reconciliation process for the past several weeks, contains some salient features that will impact life-affirming medicine. Here are some updates on those efforts for those who are having a hard time keeping up with all the news.
On Friday, July 4, President Donald Trump signed the budget reconciliation bill into law after it passed both the U.S. House & Senate. The bill includes provisions – tax cuts, spending cuts, and more – covering a vast number of areas from immigration to national defense to space exploration. Here is some of the bill’s language that will impact life-affirming care:
- Several pro-family measures, including increasing the child tax credit and establishing “Trump Account” savings accounts for every baby born
- Creating a rural hospital stabilization fund
The law also includes language about defunding Planned Parenthood, requiring that for one year, no federal tax dollars go towards funding abortion businesses like the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. This, like the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, is a major victory for our preborn and pregnant patients. However, the fight to get taxpayer money out of the abortion industry is ongoing. On July 7, a Massachusetts federal judge halted the defunding of Planned Parenthood after the abortion giant sued. We will keep you updated on the status of this lawsuit, which is almost certain to undergo appeals.
Relatedly, another exciting piece of news is that President Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 included a provision that AAPLOG Action has been uniquely fighting for: requiring that OB/GYN residency programs make abortion training opt-in versus opt-out. In 2016, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) started requiring that abortion training be included in OB/GYN residency programs by default and that trainees who do not wish to participate (whether for reasons of conscience or simple preference) opt out. As we have heard from our members, this creates a coercive environment in which pro-life residents must gather the courage to tell their superiors that they do not wish to participate in what the program considers the “full scope” of training. This requirement is also a clear violation of the Coates-Snow Amendment – a federal conscience protection that AAPLOG played a key role in bringing about. This has proven detrimental to our members’ residency experiences, heightening the level of pressure placed on them to intentionally kill their preborn patients and deterring many prolife medical students from going into the field of OB/GYN.
While this provision may not ultimately make it into the federal budget, we are very hopeful it will as the majority of Americans oppose physicians being forced to violate their conscience. The fact that it was included in the President’s budget request is a testament to our members’ impactful work and the importance of physicians’ voices.
(Dr. Christina Francis and Rebecca Weaver discuss this ACGME budget request provision in our latest podcast episode.)
