The draft document of the Strategic Plan 2018-2022 for the U.S. Government’s Health and Human Services just was released in September. It states:

“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.”

This is a major shift in the language and tone from the Obama Administration, whose 2014-2018 Strategic Plan stated this:

“HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving Americans at every stage of life.”

This change is more than simple wording. It recognizes the fact that life begins at conception, not birth, and is to be commended for this clearly, unequivocally stating this fact.

Of course, there are people who are “pro-choice” who are outraged by all this change. Dr. Jen Gunter, in New York Magazine, warns of the dire effect that this new mission statement may have for abortion in our nation.

Please God, it will! Please God, backed with the truth of science, our nation can once again recognize the fact that all life is sacred and that life, a gift of God, begins at conception. Please God, it will mean the end of legalized abortion and an embrace of the culture of life.

This new directive along with the government’s decision to provide the religious and moral exemption to the HHS mandate recognizes that faith-based and mission-driven organizations and those who run them “have deeply held religious and moral beliefs that the law must respect.”

As Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, USCCB president, and Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, Md., chairman of the USCCB’s Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, said the new HHS mandate ruling “corrects an anomalous failure by federal regulators that should never have occurred and should never be repeated.”

Cardinal DiNardo and Archbishop Lori said the decision was “good news for all Americans,” noting that a “government mandate that coerces people to make an impossible choice between obeying their consciences and obeying the call to serve the poor is harmful not only to Catholics but to the common good.”