The U.S. Catholic bishops are calling on Congress to move forward appropriations that promote families, protect unborn children, and support women.
In a May 4 letter to Congress, Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo, Ohio, who heads the Committee on Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. bishops, urged Congress “to advance appropriations that respect and affirm the dignity of all human life, from conception to natural death.”
Addressed to the chairs and vice chairs for the committees on appropriations of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, Thomas in the letter voiced support for policies that support women and children, defund abortion providers, and support restorative reproductive medicine.
“We continue to call for policies that put children and families first,” he said. “Funding priorities, aligned in this way, must respond to mothers in need and their babies, born and preborn alike.”
Thomas urged Congress to invest in maternal and child health as well as fully fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
“In addition to such assistance, pro-family policies ought to support husbands and wives and the integrity of the family itself,” he continued.
Thomas noted that the bishops’ priorities, such as “support for the poor, migrants and refugees, foreign assistance, environmental protection, health care, housing, nutrition, and more,” are founded in the “dignity and flourishing of the human person” through “the protection of innocent, preborn lives.”
Thomas urged Congress to continue upholding the Hyde Amendment, which protects taxpayer funding from being used for abortions, and to “oppose any bill that expands taxpayer funding of elective abortion.”
He also called for an extension of “last year’s historic, one-year defunding of the abortion industry in Medicaid within the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ (H.R.1),” which expires in July.
“We urge Congress not only to extend this prohibition of funding in the budget reconciliation process but complement this effort through other appropriations packages, such as by defunding major abortion providers in the Title X family planning program,” Thomas said.
“Congress should do all it can to defund this enterprise and, instead, ensure greater support for authentic, life-affirming health care providers who truly serve mothers and their children in need,” he continued.
Planned Parenthood performed an all-time high of 434,450 abortions of unborn babies in 2023-2024, according to the organizationʼs most recent annual report. Almost half of Planned Parenthood’s revenue came from taxpayer dollars, even as abortion services increased and other services dwindled, according to the groupʼs 2024-2025 annual report.
Thomas also voiced support for restorative reproductive medicine to help couples experiencing infertility have families.
“We support funding and access to resources, such as training or research, for holistic and comprehensive restorative reproductive medicine, to help identify and treat underlying causes for those experiencing infertility,” he said.
The bishop voiced opposition to in vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment opposed by the Catholic Church in which doctors fuse sperm and eggs to create human embryos and implant them in the mother’s womb. To maximize efficiency, doctors create excess human embryos and routinely destroy undesired embryos.
“IVF represents an underregulated industry that creates hundreds of thousands or even millions of preborn children who will be interminably frozen, lost in attempts to implant them within a mother, or discarded and killed (often in a selective, eugenic manner),” Thomas said.
“By turning the conception of children into a lucrative manufacturing process, IVF also violates their rights and treats them like property,” he continued.
Nevertheless, he said, “no one has any less worth because of being conceived through IVF. Every person has infinite, inherent dignity, which must be upheld through every stage and circumstance of life.”
“Society must make it easier to welcome and raise a new child and should promote life and hope for preborn children and their mothers and fathers,” Thomas said.
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