On Monday, White House spokesman John Kirby said that U.S. military leaders have a “foundational sacred obligation” to facilitate elective abortions for Department of Defense personnel. 

In an exchange with Phil Wegmann of RealClearPolitics, Kirby defended the Pentagon’s new policy of using taxpayer funds to cover the travel and lodging expenses of women stationed in states where elective abortion is illegal by saying:

Our policies, whether they are diversity, inclusion, and equity, whether they’re about transgender individuals who qualify, physically and mentally, to service, to be able to do it with dignity, or whether it is about female service members — one in five — or female family members being able to count on the kinds of healthcare, reproductive care specifically, that they need to serve, that is a foundational sacred obligation of military leaders across the river.

The notion that the U.S. military has a “foundational sacred obligation” to facilitate elective abortion is absurd, and federal law, since 1984, has banned military facilities from performing or funding elective abortions. The military will fund (and military facilities will perform) abortions if the “life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term” or “in a case in which the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest,” but not in other circumstances. The notion that the military has a “sacred” obligation to use taxpayer money to fund the purely elective destruction of babies in the womb will strike many Americans as obscene.

Kirby nevertheless pressed the claim that without the Biden administration’s new abortion-funding policy, the military will suffer recruitment and retention losses. “What if you’re assigned to a state like Alabama, which has a pretty restrictive abortion law in place, and you’re concerned about your reproductive care?” Kirby said. “What do you do? Do you say no and get out? Some people may decide to do that. And what does that mean? That means we lose talent, important talent.”

But it was already the case before Dobbs that service members could be stationed at a base that was not near an abortion facility. “Even Before Roe Was Overturned, Nearly One in 10 People Obtaining an Abortion Traveled Across State Lines for Care,” according to a Guttmacher Institute report. As Arkansas senator Tom Cotton said, on Fox News Sunday, of Department of Defense personnel seeking out-of-state abortions: “If they want to take that step, they have 30 days of annual leave. It shouldn’t be taxpayer funds giving them three weeks of paid, uncharged leave and then also paying for travel and lodging and meals — something that we don’t even give our troops when they have a parent die.”