HHS has never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death. That is thanks, above all, to the work of President Trump, the most pro-life President in American history.
As Prepared for Delivery
Thank you for that kind introduction, Tony, and thank you all for that warm welcome.
The voices and commitment provided by Americans of faith are vitally important in our public square.
In working to build a healthier, stronger America, we simply cannot succeed without the help of Americans of faith.
Today, I want to take a few moments to update you on some of the important work we've been doing at HHS on some of the issues that you care about.
HHS's mission is to enhance and protect the health and well-being of all Americans.
That's an incredibly broad and exciting mission.
It means everything from helping Americans recover from addiction and protecting our country from infectious diseases, to lowering prescription drug prices, supporting our seniors by protecting Medicare, and helping Americans achieve independence through finding work.
All of these efforts are of real importance to President Trump. He cares about protecting and improving Americans' lives.
Under this administration, we've also gone about our mission with a principle in mind: All of this work must be approached with an appreciation for the dignity of every human life, and with respect for the conscience rights of every American.
In fact, under President Trump, we put it right in our agency's five-year strategic plan: HHS is dedicated to serving "all Americans, from conception to natural death."
We have the privilege of protecting life and conscience in so many ways, because of the sheer breadth of what HHS does—all of the statutes we enforce and all the programs we run.
My friend, Vice President Pence, has a joke he likes to tell about the tax code: that the IRS's code is ten times the size of the Bible, but with none of the good news.
I'm afraid to say, if you put all of HHS's statutes and regulations together, that stack of paper probably makes the tax code look like the Book of Jude.
So, today, I won't be able to run through all the accomplishments of our administration at HHS, but I hope you'll see we've been hard at work.
I want to begin with one particularly proud moment for this administration. As many of you know, last month, President Trump delivered a bold message at the U.N.—it's a bit of an annual tradition.
He laid out the frightening state of religious freedom around the world—and called on all nations to do more to protect persons of faith.
As an Arab Christian, whose own family knew real religious persecution within this past century, I am especially grateful to be a part of what the entire Trump Administration is doing to protect religious minorities around the world.
Unfortunately, in international circles, not only have threats to religious freedom often been ignored, but the sacred importance of the family and the right to life are often disrespected, too.
As someone who has now represented the United States on health matters around the world for almost two decades, I can tell you, it is discouraging and disheartening to see how international organizations and wealthy nations can bully countries on matters of fundamental importance, like the sacred role of family and the right to life.
So, earlier this year, Secretary Pompeo and I publicly called upon the world's nations to stand up against this kind of anti-life advocacy.
We did so in the lead-up to a major meeting at the U.N. General Assembly, where we anticipated an effort to suggest that all nations ought to view abortion as a necessary element of healthcare, and to claim that abortion is a fundamental human right.
The eventual declaration from that meeting included terms that, without caveats, can and have been used to bully lower-income nations regarding their policies on issues like abortion.
So, did any of you hear what we ended up doing at the U.N. in response?
Following President Trump's lead, we gathered a coalition of 21 nations, representing more than 1.3 billion people and four of the ten largest nations on earth. Together, we took a stand.
We delivered a clear message: Each nation has a sovereign right to protect the lives of its own citizens and to protect the role of the family within their own borders.
We made it unequivocally clear: Under President Trump, the United States will never tolerate language that implies there is an international right to abortion.
We will boldly proclaim that there is no such right, we will hold U.N. agencies accountable when they drift into such advocacy, and we will continue to protect life around the world.
We've worked closely with Secretary Pompeo and the State Department to implement President Trump's restored and expanded Mexico City Policy—one of his first actions as President.
Under that policy, "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance," we've worked to ensure that HHS's global health assistance is not provided to foreign non-governmental organizations that provide or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
The Mexico City policy has always attracted all kinds of criticism, with claims about how it would imperil the important work we do overseas.
Yet, when we implemented the expanded version of the policy, HHS only saw one grantee drop out of our programs—and we were able to find another provider to fill the gap, without any interruption in services whatsoever.
Another interesting area where this administration has fought for life is our scientific work.
We've ensured that the life-saving scientific research that we support is not done in a way that disrespects life.
This administration is proud to recognize that, as all of you know well, you can be pro-life and pro-science at the same time.
One of the exciting signs of that commitment is the President's success in passing Right-to-Try.
Every year of life, every month or day for someone struggling with a terminal illness, is precious.
The President recognizes that, which is why he fought for, and signed, legislation that will open up more opportunities for patients who are diagnosed with life-threatening diseases to access new experimental treatment options.
That is just one more sign of a President who is intent on building a culture of life, dignity, and hope.
We've also been vigorous in ensuring that taxpayer funding is not going to support abortion as a method of family planning.
This year, HHS began implementing a rule that enforces statutory requirements under Title X, by no longer permitting family planning services, funded with your taxpayer dollars, from occurring at the same location where abortion is provided.
Unbelievably, many abortion-providing Title X recipients chose to pull out of the program—and stop delivering healthcare to women in need—rather than complying with the law passed by Congress.
The new Title X regulation also protects women and children who've been victims of abuse, molestation, trafficking, and a number of other crimes, which complies with a requirement passed by Congress that the previous administration had ignored.
We rescinded an Obama-administration guidance that prevented states from taking actions against providers that may be necessary to prevent Medicaid funds from going to fund abortion.
We're also protecting your own healthcare dollars from going to services that could violate your conscience. Last year, we issued guidance to allow people to claim a hardship exemption from the ACA's individual mandate if all affordable ACA plans offered in their area included abortion coverage, contrary to their beliefs.
One of the unshakeable commitments of HHS, in our civil rights and non-discrimination work, is to ensure that every American is treated with dignity and is not discriminated against in our programs because he or she is a member of a statutorily protected class.
All individuals should be treated with dignity and respect in healthcare.
But all Americans who participate in or benefit from our programs also have a right to be free from discrimination not just based on protected classes, but the dictates of their consciences and the ways they live out their faith.
Neither form of discrimination will be tolerated under this administration.
In fact, we've institutionalized that commitment.
In 2018, we announced the establishment of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in our Office for Civil Rights, under the leadership of Roger Severino, to begin proper federal enforcement of existing laws that protect our first freedom.
This year, we finalized a new, comprehensive conscience regulation, which protects the conscience and nondiscrimination rights of patients and healthcare providers by fully and robustly enforcing approximately 25 provisions passed by Congress.
All we're doing is providing ways to enforce the laws that are on the books, typically passed with strong bipartisan support by the people's representatives in Congress.
If you listened to critics of our regulation, you'd imagine we wrote some wholly new set of policies or laws.
Yet literally all we're doing is providing robust enforcement mechanisms for the laws Congress passed!
Our regulation provides the same kind of enforcement powers for these laws that we already accord to other civil rights protections.
We've done the enforcement work to back this up, too. We recently issued a notice of violation to a major hospital after finding that the hospital violated conscience laws by requiring a nurse to assist in an abortion.
Forcing medical staff to assist in the taking of human life is wrong, plain and simple, and under President Trump, we will not tolerate it.
We also took major actions against Hawaii and California to protect the conscience rights of pro-life pregnancy centers. When state laws coerced these centers into posting notices that referred women to abortion providers, we issued an unprecedented notice of violation under what are known as the Weldon and Coats-Snowe Amendments.
Partly as a result of that action, Hawaii signed a resolution agreement with the Trump Administration not to enforce its own discriminatory state law.
We've also protected the freedom of faith-based organizations that work for the vulnerable in human services, by reducing barriers for faith-based providers who care for the elderly and disabled and provide foster and adoption services.
For instance, we issued South Carolina a waiver that ensured faith-based organizations can continue to serve children in need of foster care.
We determined that these organizations would have otherwise faced unacceptable burdens to their religious beliefs. We certainly don't want to put up barriers to Americans living out their beliefs through providing important care to a vulnerable, needy population.
Many of you are quite familiar with one of the most prominent conscience fights in recent memory: the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act.
The mandate required employer-sponsored insurance to cover some types of contraception that some religious groups and organizations found objectionable on religious or moral grounds.
This included all kinds of organizations, but most poignantly, many that care for the least among us, like the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order that cares for elderly Americans of limited means.
As many of you know, the Little Sisters of the Poor and other groups fell under the scope of this regulation because the previous administration's so-called accommodation for religious organizations was quite narrow.
In fact, I've heard it joked that Jesus's own ministry might have had a hard time qualifying as a religious organization by something as strict as that originally promulgated definition.
You could almost imagine the scrutiny: Just 12 guys? They only fed the 5,000 once? Is that an organized religious concern? Hard to say.
The Trump Administration recognized that the Little Sisters of the Poor, and so many other religious organizations and private citizens with religious or conscience objections, had a right to live out their faiths through service.
We stood beside the Little Sisters of the Poor and many other groups, and provided them with the exemptions they deserved under the law. If you want to live out your faith and serve your fellow American, we will not make you violate your conscience to do it.
Finally, I want to mention that we've gone beyond just protecting the rights of religious Americans to live out their faith by providing medical care and other important services.
Through our Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, or the Partnership Center, under the leadership of Shannon Royce, we've assisted communities of faith and faith-based providers in confronting many pressing health challenges.
We've been especially proud to see faith communities work to expand access to treatment for Americans struggling with opioid addiction.
What I've laid out for you today is all the ways that, under President Trump, HHS has protected life, conscience, and faith. There's a whole lot going on.
But when I think about the very core of our mission, and why I'm so proud to do the work we're doing, it's pretty simple: The Department I get to run is, really, the Department of Life.
I am so proud to say that has never been more true than it is today. HHS has never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death.
That is thanks, above all, to the work of President Trump, the most pro-life President in American history.
I'm grateful for the chance to lead that work, and to share it with you all today.
You're here today because you cherish life.
You all innately know that every human being, as the Psalms put it, is fearfully and wonderfully made. This means that each person, whether unborn, young, old, or somewhere in between, has innate dignity.
At HHS, and under President Trump, we respect that truth and will continue to fight for it. That truth undergirds our mission and informs our work every day at the department.
As you go about your work—protecting life, strengthening your own communities, and caring for your families and your country—may God bless you, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.
