WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life leaders say recent revelations about how Planned Parenthood concealed possibly illegal loans to Planned Parenthood underscores the need to defund the abortion giant.

On Monday, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) alleged that emails show that, during the Biden administration, top officials with the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) forgave and issued loans to Planned Parenthood, despite its ineligibility, and kept it obscured by using the word “Benghazi” as code for the abortion giant’s name.

The loans were originally issued in the Trump administration’s final year as part of emergency COVID relief to small businesses. Republicans lobbied to have the loans refunded, as Planned Parenthood did not qualify as a “small business” under the CARES Act, but the money had not been returned by the time the Trump administration was replaced by the Biden administration, which also approved additional loans.

In April 2021, SBA attorney Peggy Hamilton convened a meeting with an email headline “Benghazi Decisions,” tasked with “reviewing loans to non profit PPP applicants to decision [sic] whether affiliation bars eligibility… WH has been engaged.” The context, Ernst argued, indicates “Benghazi” was a code word for the real subject, Planned Parenthood.

“It strains credulity to think SBA’s General Counsel Peggy Hamilton was doing anything other than hiding her Planned Parenthood records from Congressional and public scrutiny and oversight,” Ernst said. “That’s not something she is allowed to do under federal law, and, as a lawyer for almost three decades, she knew that.”

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said the revelation is all the more reason to cut off the abortion giant’s taxpayer funding.

“Just when we think the Democrats’ extremism can’t get more shocking, we see the lengths they’ll go to in protecting the Big Abortion industry. They knew letting Planned Parenthood help itself to taxpayer-funded Covid loans was illegal – so they tried to cover their tracks using, of all things, the national horror of Benghazi,” said SBA President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “We urge Congress to stand strong and do everything in its power to pass a reconciliation bill that keeps Big Abortion defunded. Taxpayers should never be forced to fund the brutality of abortion.”

Last July, President Donald Trump signed into law his controversial “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB), a wide-ranging policy package that includes a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to entities that commit abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life.

However, that provision is slated to expire this July, so on April 22, a coalition of 40 pro-life leaders sent a letter to Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune calling on Congress to renew the defunding not for another year, but for another 10. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has already introduced an amendment to the latest Senate Budget Resolution that would extend the ban through 2035.

Cutting off federal funds to the abortion industry is the issue on which Trump’s second term most closely resembles the pro-life record of his first.

Within weeks of returning to office, Trump began enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which bans direct federal funding of most abortions; reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which forbids non-governmental organizations from using taxpayer dollars for most abortions abroad; and cut millions in pro-abortion subsidies by freezing U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending. 

The White House’s budget proposal for the 2027 fiscal year contains numerous pro-life provisions, renewing the Hyde Amendment, the Hyde-Weldon Amendment against funding entities that discriminate against pro-life healthcare providers, and the Kemp-Kasten provision against funding any organization involved in coercive abortion programs. It also forbids State Department grants from going to organizations that commit or promote abortions, bans any funding of research involving the use of aborted babies’ tissue or cells, requires medical students to have to consciously opt in to any abortion training that they might take rather than being required by default and having to opt out, blocks funding of abortions in federal prison, bans funds from going to most abortions via the Peace Corps and Federal Health Employee Benefits program, and more.

However, White House budget proposals are not binding, and actual budgets typically end up falling far short after working their way through Congress. Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has reportedly ruled out including a renewal of Planned Parenthood’s aforementioned defunding in the upcoming reconciliation bill, in the interest of passing a renewal of funding for the Department of Homeland Security and, with it, the president’s deportation priorities.

The administration also angered pro-lifers recently by renewing Biden-era Title X grants to Planned Parenthood for one more year. The White House claims it was bound by law to do so, but stressed that this would be the final year. Pro-lifers have urged Trump to reinstate his first term’s Protect Life Rule, which required complete “financial and physical” separation between Title X recipients and involvement with abortion.

To end the cycle of uncertainty of having to periodically fight for temporary defunding measures at regular budget intervals, pro-lifers have also called for new standalone laws to fully and permanently defund the abortion industry: the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act, which permanently bans federal funds from being used for abortion; and the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, which disqualifies Planned Parenthood and its affiliates specifically. But they would require 60 votes to make it through the Senate.