FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Biden administration is pressuring Sierra Leone to pass an unpopular pro-abortion bill before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, a former senior U.S. government official who has worked in the West African region told The Daily Signal.
It is common knowledge among nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, in Sierra Leone that a U.S. foreign aid agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation is threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from a U.S. agreement with Sierra Leone unless the West African country’s parliament passes the bill decriminalizing abortion, the former government official said.
The Sierra Leone Compact is a five-year, $480 million agreement between the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC, and Sierra Leone aimed at providing affordable electricity. The MCC didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
“It is deeply disturbing, but not terribly surprising, that we are hearing reports that the Biden administration is threatening to withhold foreign assistance to Sierra Leone unless legislators there pass the deceptively named ‘Safe Motherhood Act’ legislation that would legalize abortion in Sierra Leone, a country that currently protects unborn life,” Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said in a statement first shared with The Daily Signal.
The so-called Safe Motherhood Act would legalize abortion up to 14 weeks for any reason and up to birth to protect the “mental health of the woman.” Abortion to save a woman’s life is already legal in Sierra Leone.
Smith decried what he called the Biden administration’s “pro-abortion bullying tactics and raw attempt at ideological colonialism” in Sierra Leone.
“Pro-life countries should be celebrated and respected for protecting unborn children and their mothers—not penalized by a pro-abortion, lame-duck Biden administration,” he said.
Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration is 35 days away, and the Biden administration’s Millennium Challenge Corporation wants to finalize abortion on demand before a second Trump administration with different priorities takes over, the former senior official said.
An informed NGO leader in Sierra Leone told the official that the country’s parliament plans to vote on the bill this week under pressure from the Biden administration to pass it as soon as possible.
The first Trump administration introduced the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which established that there isn’t an international right to abortion. The Biden administration removed the U.S. from the accord designed to promote women’s health and strengthen the family, but Trump has promised to rejoin the declaration.
Not only did the Biden administration remove the U.S. from the accord, but his State Department also recommended other countries remove themselves.
Also under the Biden administration, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, planned to increase contraception usage among Sierra Leonean women by 2027.
“Let me be clear, abortion is not health care, nor is it an internationally recognized human ‘right,'” Smith said.
Smith, co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus, said he plans to work with the incoming Trump administration “to conduct a thorough review of actions by all U.S. agencies, from USAID to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, to determine whether U.S. laws were violated by U.S. government staff through misallocation—or threat of misallocation—of U.S. funding in order to pressure countries to change their pro-life laws,” he said.
“Forcing a pro-abortion and woke agenda on financially vulnerable and democratic sovereign nations harms both the U.S. and our allies and is bad diplomacy,” Smith said. “It must end.”
Religious leaders in Sierra Leone oppose the abortion law, as do the majority of Sierra Leoneans, according to the former U.S. official, who said he remains close to citizens there. Sierra Leone’s population is 77% Muslim and 22% Christian, according to a 2022 State Department report.
In August, President Julius Maada Bio announced that his government unanimously backed the bill. The Ministry of Information and Civic Education held a panel discussion Thursday promoting the bill.
The Biden administration has a history of pushing left-wing special interests such as abortion on demand and the LGBTQ agenda on African countries.
U.S. tax dollars in South Africa fund “comprehensive sexuality education” curricula that teach fourth graders about being “born in the wrong body,” and describe gender as being “socially constructed.”
Smith sounded the alarm last year on a Biden administration plan that he said would “hijack” President George W. Bush’s 2002 program of delivering AIDS relief to Africa to promote its abortion agenda.
“President Biden has hijacked PEPFAR, the $6 billion a year foreign aid program designed to mitigate HIV/AIDS in many targeted—mostly Africa —countries in order to promote abortion on demand,” Smith wrote in a letter to fellow lawmakers.
Valerie Huber, founder and president of the Institute for Women’s Health and former special representative for Global Women’s Health under the Trump administration, said she has heard many such stories about the Biden administration’s pressuring countries to adopt or change laws and policies that are high priority for the Biden administration but “antithetical to the values and laws of those countries.”
“Unfortunately, whenever I meet with other countries that are either members of the GCD or are considering membership, without exception they say 100% of our foreign policy has been ideological, and as a result, anti-American sentiment is at an all-time high in their countries over this ideological pressure,” Huber told The Daily Signal.
Huber said the Biden administration forces countries to choose between compromising their values and constitutions and receiving the U.S. funding they need.
“U.S. foreign policy has been transformed into an ideological puzzle to really force countries to make a very difficult decision,” Huber said.
The State Department didn’t immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
