By Dave Andrusko

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As Congress races toward the finish line in its massive effort to "reform" our nation's health system (accounting for a sixth of the entire economy), pro-abortionists are racing to embed abortion in any new system. As we discussed yesterday, the pro-abortion Democratic congressional leadership is stealthier about its plans than outside advocacy groups. But either way--blunt or cautious--the objective is the same: weave the destruction of unborn children into the very fabric of how health care is financed and delivered.

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama, waving at PPFA Action Fund supporters at a 2007 appearance.

There are preliminary skirmishes that remind us what happens when abortions are paid for with public money. The Guttmacher Institute (formerly the think-tank for Planned Parenthood) just issued a "media update" under the headline, "Restricting Medicaid Funding for Abortion Forces One in Four Poor Women to Carry Unwanted Pregnancies to Term."

The primary focus of Guttmacher's wrath is the Hyde Amendment. "It is time for Congress to repeal the Hyde Amendment and restore Medicaid coverage for abortion so that every woman, regardless of her economic circumstances, has the right to decide when and whether to have a child," intoned Heather Boonstra, a Guttmacher senior public policy associate.

In other contexts, groups such as Guttmacher have calculated that because of the Hyde Amendment, at least a million babies were not aborted who otherwise would have died. The total is likely much higher.

Obama, ever searching for "common ground," called for the repeal of the Dornan amendment, which prohibited government funding of abortion in the District of Columbia, except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or incest. Dutifully on June 25, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services reported out a Financial Services appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2010 that would gut the longstanding language which has been included in the annual D.C. appropriations bill continuously since 1996.

Last night a bi-partisan effort in the full Appropriations Committee failed in its effort to restore the ban. As NRLC explained in a July 2 letter to members of the House, the true cost of eliminating the Dornan amendment "would be in the loss of approximately 1,000 extra human lives during each fiscal year that government-funded abortion is available."

It is crucial to understand that this is just an opening salvo, a down payment on pro-abortion President Barack Obama's larger Abortion Agenda. As NRLC Federal Legislative Director Douglas Johnson has explained, "During his campaign, Obama was very clear that he believes that abortion on demand is a basic health service that should be part of a minimum, government-mandated package of benefits. That means, among other things, that the law would require workers and employers to pay for universal abortion coverage with their mandatory premiums, and require all taxpayers to fund abortion on demand for lower-income people."

As for the larger pro-abortion movement, it "sees federal 'health care reform' legislation as a golden opportunity to force-feed abortion into every nook and cranny of the health-care delivery system," Johnson explained. "Their goal, as they sometimes put it, is to 'mainstream' abortion. They hope to use the structure of a federal health-care law to make abortion on demand accessible in every region of every state, paid for by taxes and by government-mandated private insurance premiums."

Pro-abortion organizations have released the "results" of polls that supposedly show support for the inclusion of abortion in national health care reforms. The truth is they know that the pro-abortion policies they hope to impose do not have broad public support.

Take the results of a national Zogby poll conducted last November. Zogby asked if "a bill that would force many employers to provide health insurance to their employees" should "require insurance plans pay for abortions when the abortions are performed as a method of birth control." A whopping 71% said no while only 20% said yes.

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Part Two