(LifeSiteNews) — Ambassador Nikki Haley is wrong – a federal abortion ban is entirely possible.

The 2024 presidential candidate wants the GOP to focus on ancillary issues, such as making abortifacient birth control easily accessible and placing limits on abortion around 20 weeks, saving about 1 percent of babies.

“At the federal level, it’s not realistic. It’s not being honest with the American people,” Haley claimed, often noting a lack of a majority of pro-life senators.

While it is true that a straight up and down vote on abortion in Congress would likely fail for the time being, it is not true that a de facto abortion ban, or as I would envision it, death by a thousand cuts, cannot be passed. It just takes some creativity and will and politicians who don’t throw their hands up in the air.

This is a strategy worth considering until a constitutional amendment or other federal abortion ban can get through.

The power is in the purse strings, and Republicans can push for riders on budget bills that could drastically slash abortions.

Remember: a lack of abortionists, abortion facilities, and abortion drugs makes abortion essentially illegal. Because there is no longer a federal “right” to abortion, congressional laws that limit abortion-related funding likely have a higher chance of surviving scrutiny. The post-Dobbs judicial landscape is wide open.

I’ve been out of the pro-life policy realm for over three years now, and I am not an attorney. But it would seem to me that a bold president who is actually committed to abolishing abortion, not winning the mythical pro-choice suburban moderate voter, could find ways to enact these suggestions and more.

Let’s lock the best and the brightest from the Claremont Institute, Americans United for Life, and the Heritage Foundation in a room for a week and see what ideas they propose.

For example, defunding Planned Parenthood and preventing other abortion facilities and even hospitals that commit abortions from accessing taxpayer dollars would go a long way to shutting them down and making abortions inaccessible. If hospitals want to access the billions of dollars for medical residency training through Medicare, they need to agree never to commit abortions. Trillions of dollars in federal spending is a massive lever to effect change.

Riders could also be attached to post office funding to bar any post office worker from delivering RU-486 abortion drugs. Companies that produce abortion drugs could theoretically be excluded from federal funding grant opportunities for their non-abortion business through legislation that funds the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.

Walgreens and CVS want those Medicare reimbursements for flu shots? They better stop handing out abortion drugs then. The Hyde Amendment could be applied to Department of Education spending, so if universities want to access billions in tuition aid and other dollars, they need to stop committing abortions on campus (i.e. in California) and not operate abortion facilities.

My former employer is attempting to use environmental laws to halt the spread of abortion drugs. Future Environmental Protection Agency overhaul laws could include stipulations that abortion drug manufacturers pay hefty fees into a federal fund for each abortion drug they produce.

There is precedent for using outside-the-box thinking. Remember, for years Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare. Then they effectively eliminated the individual mandate, even after losing at the Supreme Court, by zeroing out the penalty as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

A federal ban on all chemical and surgical mutilation similarly cannot pass in this Congress – but Congressman Dan Crenshaw is correctly using the budget process to try to “block Children’s Hospital Graduate Medical Education Payment Program (CHGME) funding for children’s hospitals that provide transgender treatments or procedures to minors.”

Such maneuvers also give coverage to moderate Democrats. They can vote for conservative policies attached to larger budget bills by citing the overall benefit of the other spending priorities while still explicitly rejecting the restrictions.

Abortion can be federally restricted, and possibly to such a point that it is nearly impossible to get an abortion.

This is a strategy to consider in the interim while complete bans are passed at the federal and state level. The pro-life movement should remember the success of Texas’ novel heartbeat law.

For years, gestation limits always faced a hurdle of getting passed Roe v. Wade. Then, as a sign of things to come, Texas passed Senate Bill 8, which opened up lawsuits against anyone who participates in abortions.

Nikki Haley, much like her former boss and potential future running mate, is wrong about the path forward on abortion. She refuses to be bold and to think outside of the box to save babies – which is exactly what is needed, for the time being, to get a de facto federal ban in place.