Trump Administration Defines Life ‘Beginning at Conception’

The Trump administration has released a strategic plan for the years 2018-2022 that asserts clearly at several points that life begins at conception.

The document is located on the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception,” the document states initially.

In contrast, the Obama administration’s document read, “HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving Americans at every stage of life.”

In explaining its “Strategic Goal 1: Reform, Strengthen, and Modernize the Nation’s Health Care,” the Trump administration document continues, “While we may refer to the people we serve as beneficiaries, enrollees, patients, or consumers, our ultimate goal is to improve healthcare outcomes for all people, including the unborn, across healthcare settings.”

A third mention of the administration’s mission to protect life from conception occurs in “Strategic Goal 3: Strengthen the Economic and Social Well-Being of Americans across the Lifespan.”

“A core component of the HHS mission is our dedication to serve all Americans from conception to natural death, but especially those individuals and populations facing or at high risk for economic and social well-being challenges, through effective human services,” the document states.

“It is vital our government’s definitions of terms correspond to reality,” said Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus, in a statement praising HHS’s strategic plan. “Therefore, I applaud the Trump Health and Human Services’s new strategic plan that defines life as beginning at conception, which any average high school biology student knows to be true.”

Franks further explained that the left “has not successfully been able to redefine when life begins,” and added:

Personhood, the line of argument continues, is conferred by the mother when she decides she wants to keep her child. This is a dangerous line of thinking that could lead to the justification of ending the lives for any and all of society’s ‘undesired’ persons. What an inexpressibly dangerous and inhumane notion for Humanity to embrace.

“The role of government is to protect innocent human life in that human course, HHS’s inclusion of the correct definition of life pursues that noble goal,” Franks concluded.