A recent Newsweek article critical of President Donald J. Trump’s Title X rule barring the funding of abortions through the federal Title X program came after Joe Biden struck down the 45th President’s rule, opening up millions of federal dollars to directly fund abortions.

Indirectly, while trying to bash President Trump, Newsweek’s Mary Ellen Cagnassola was forced to admit that his 2019 Protect Life Rule for Title X funding “caused Planned Parenthood to leave” the program, which “may have resulted in an estimated 180,000 unplanned pregnancies” and “a 37% overall reduction in clients from the average caseload from 2016-2018, or 1.5 million fewer women a year” served by the program.

Live Action notes that unintended pregnancies were declining before President Trump’s rule, writing:

The proposal does claim, “As a result of the decrease in clients able to receive Title X services, it is estimated that the 2019 Final Rule may have led to up to 181,477 unintended pregnancies.” This number is curiously derived, however, because it is based on the decrease in the number of Title X patients from 2018 to 2019 — a total of 844,083 people.

But Trump’s rule was not enforced until August of 2019, and the number of people being served by Title X had been decreasing for several years prior to Trump’s rule change according to HHS’s own numbers; there was actually a 2% decrease between 2017 and 2018, well before the rule change was even instituted.

Despite popular belief, the Trump administration actually increased funding to Title X program recipients, 87% of which were not Planned Parenthood facilities. As Live Action News previously noted, “59% of patients getting Title X services are NOT getting them from Planned Parenthood…  Planned Parenthood’s Title X qualified services have DROPPED 60% over eight years… [and] Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) outnumber Planned Parenthood centers 20 to 1….”

Clearly, not all of the decrease in clients served by Title X between 2018 and 2019 can be blamed on the changes mandated by Trump’s Protect Life Rule.

But let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that it could. Even in this case, the Newsweek piece is off base in attributing all of the alleged unintended pregnancies associated with the decrease to Planned Parenthood’s departure from the Title X program, since according to the HHS proposal, Planned Parenthood’s client share during the years they participated in the program maxed out at 41%. So at most, their departure could be blamed for only 41% of those 181,000 alleged unintended pregnancies.

Regardless of the number of babies the rule did save, President Trump is directly responsible for saving at least 180,000 babies who were not aborted with federal funds through the Title X program.