From FRC:
Starting Thursday morning, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) will try to get to the bottom of some pretty serious allegations at Health and Human Services (HHS). Did Kathleen Sebelius's Department give the order to slash funding from a Catholic program because of its pro-life views? The Committee on Government Oversight aims to find out in "HHS and the Catholic Church: Examining the Politicization of Grants." Chairman Issa has been pressing Sebelius for information on the controversy for weeks. In two letters--one from Rep. Issa and one from Senate Republicans--leaders asked the Secretary to turn over a series of internal documents on her agency's grant review process, which even HHS staffers called "unfair."
According to the Washington Post, the decision to pull the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) funding wasn't based on agency reviews, but on religious bias. Under HHS's own evaluation process, the USCCB scored "excellent" marks for its effectiveness. As it should. In just five years, its program helped more than 2,000 sex slaves find food, shelter, and medical care. But instead of renewing the contract, HHS redirected its grant to abortion-friendly organizations that scored "significantly below" the USCCB. When the President's political appointees suddenly inserted themselves in the funding process, suspicions grew. To the surprise (and later outrage) of agency officials who oversee the grants, their recommendations to partner with the bishops were ignored. "In the case of the trafficking contract, senior political appointees at HHS stepped in to award the new grants to the bishops' competitors, overriding an independent review board and career staffers who had recommended that the bishops be funded again..."
Enter Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. In an unusual move, her office also used its influence. Insiders say that "HHS staffers objected to the involvement of the Secretary's office, saying the goal was to exclude the Catholic bishops..." In other words, this administration not only manipulated the funding process. It was willing to give less qualified groups money just to satisfy their abortion agenda. If that means victims of sexual exploitation don't receive the best care possible, then that's a sacrifice this administration is willing to make. Ironically, it was President Obama who said funding decisions "must be free from political interference... and must be made on the basis of merit, not on the basis of the religious affiliation..." Obviously, his senior officials didn't get the memo, or they're reflective of a much bigger problem: an administration that's increasingly hostile to faith. Either way, they made a mistake--one we hope Darrell Issa can help correct.
See also:
Chuck Colson - "A Very Unhealth Situation"
Jason Tomassini - "Catholic bishops say religious freedom waning" Reuters | November 14, 2011
Michael Gerson - "Obama turns his back on Catholics" Washington Post | November 14, 2011
Michelle Bachman - "Administration drops Catholic humanitarian work that provoked ACLU" Catholic News Agency | October 13, 2011
Update: Steven Wagner - "Kathleen Sebelius' Gruesome Moral Calculus" Nov. 29, 2011 This article lays out the issues of sex trafficking and Sebelius' HHS with particular clarity.
[...] The Church’s victims’ services program is not the only faith-based agency affected by HHS’ new requirement that victims receive the “full range of family-planning services,” including abortions and contraception. The Salvation Army — a huge presence in the trafficking-services arena — and the expanding membership of the Christian Trafficking Shelter Association also will undoubtedly decline to participate in the HHS program. Instead of expanding the pool of organizations working to “rescue and restore” victims of human trafficking, Kathleen Sebelius is advancing a policy that will diminish the reach of these vital services. But that’s okay with our secretary of Health and Human Services who holds that the “positive good” of abortion trumps all other considerations.
This dispute isn’t simply about the morality of abortion in general; it is about the specific harm inflicted on victims of human trafficking by the Sebelius policy. Not only is she creating a disincentive for organizations to serve victims where once there had been an open door; her policy will visit additional harm on the victims. In fact, to provide abortions or regimes of contraception to a person currently being exploited for commercial sex might very well be a death sentence.
Not Pretty Woman
A victim of human trafficking is someone compelled to perform labor or to engage in commercial sex against his or her will. This is an economic crime, committed for the profit of the trafficker. When the victim is an adult, trafficking occurs when the victim’s will is overcome by means of force, fraud or coercion. But under federal law, every juvenile who is exploited in commercial sex is also a victim — period. A juvenile cannot consent to engage in commercial sex under the law.
Commercial sexual exploitation is not Pretty Woman (the unrealistic movie with Julia Roberts); it is an unrelenting nightmare of dignity-crushing serial rape. Those who have been sexually exploited are typically deeply traumatized, and there is arguably no population in the U.S. so large and in such dire need of help with so few sources of aid as victims of human trafficking.
When Congress passed the original anti-trafficking statute in 2000, they had in mind persons from other countries being victimized here in the U.S. But it turns out that the vast majority of victims in this country are actually our own kids: 250,000 juvenile victims each year vs. perhaps 20,000 foreign victims, based on U.S. government estimates. As an aside, HHS has ruled that none of the money appropriated to help victims of human trafficking can be used to help American victims — the money can only assist foreign victims.
In 2006, HHS conducted a competition to identify an organization that could assemble a national network of service providers willing and able to assist victims of human trafficking and to provide a modest financial stipend to those organizations, based on the number of victims each was serving. The U.S. bishops’ conference won the competition and has been successfully administering that project until this fall.
This year, instead of renewing the contract with the USCCB, HHS decided to conduct a new competition with new rules: “[HHS] will give strong preference to applicants that are willing to offer all of the services and referrals …” to include “the full range of legally permissible gynecological and obstetric care.”
The USCCB applied anyway, and despite its disadvantageous refusal to provide “the full range of gynecological services,” their grant proposal scored the second-highest number of points in an objective review of all applications. Undeterred, as Markon reports in his Post story, HHS political appointees funded the highest-rated applicant, then skipped over USCCB to fund two more applicants that scored much lower — so low that the professional program staff deemed their applications to be noncompetitive (read: “unqualified”).
Dead by 21
So what good is Secretary Sebelius, working through her political appointees, seeking to achieve in jettisoning a proven and effective contractor and choosing instead two unqualified grantees? This “higher good,” of course, is abortion. If a victim of human trafficking gets pregnant, then of course she should have an abortion, right? This value trumps all other considerations.
But let’s look more closely at this proposition. If someone is being trafficked — which is to say, under the domination of a pimp/trafficker — she is by definition unable to provide informed consent to an abortion or to a regime of contraception. The victim has no voice in this decision. Indeed, providing such services to a victim of sexual trafficking benefits only the trafficker by getting the victim back out on the street and making money sooner.
The average age of entry into commercial sex exploitation is about 14. The average life expectancy of someone in commercial sexual exploitation is seven years. Start at 14, dead by 21. The mortality rate for someone in commercial sexual exploitation is 40 times higher than for a non-exploited person of the same age. Helping a victim return to exploitation more quickly by terminating a pregnancy increases the odds of death.
Kristy Childs is a survivor of commercial sexual exploitation and the founder of Veronica’s Voice, an organization in Kansas City that rescues victims. She tells me there have been many live births among her clients over the past 12 years, but she has yet to be asked for help getting an abortion. “Pregnancy often leads a woman to seek rescue and a new life,” she said.
So, on the one hand, we have the USCCB, which will never facilitate an abortion but will arrange to meet all of the other appropriate service needs of victims, from residence to medical and mental-health treatment. On the other hand, we have an abortion provider such as Planned Parenthood, whose staff have been videotaped as being willing to perpetuate the apparent sex slavery of a juvenile by arranging for an abortion and not reporting the suspicion of felony sex abuse of a minor to authorities. Which is acting in the authentic interests of the victim?
According to Secretary Sebelius’ gruesome moral calculation, the authentic interests of the victim take a back seat to liberalizing the provision of abortion — rather the inverse of a preferential option for the poor. Someone with such a distorted moral compass ought not to be making policy decisions on behalf of the nation.
Steven Wagner, president of the Renewal Forum, is the former director of the Human Trafficking Program at HHS, from 2003-2006, and the architect of the original program to aid victims of human trafficking administered by the USCCB.