Innumerable polls show that the great
majority of Americans reject the notion
that abortion should be regarded as a
routine part of "healthcare." For
example, a 2010 Zogby/O’Leary poll found
that 76 percent of Americans said that
federal funds should never pay for
abortion or should pay only to save the
life of the mother.
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|
National Right to
Life Federal Legislative Director
Douglas Johnson |
Until the 2009-2010 Congress, federal
law for the most part reflected this
majority opinion. The Hyde Amendment,
for example, annually prohibits any
funds that flow through the Health and
Human Services (HHS) appropriations bill
from funding either abortions or managed
care plans that cover abortion (except
to save the life of the mother or in
cases of rape and incest). Another
example: For decades, the hundreds of
private health plans that participate in
the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB)
program have been prohibited from
covering elective abortions.
During the 111th Congress, the House
of Representatives initially acted to
apply these same principles to
legislation to restructure the
healthcare system. In November, 2009,
the House voted 240 to 194 in favor of
the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which would
have prohibited federal subsidies for
elective abortion in any component of
the healthcare legislation.
Regrettably, the bill later muscled into
law by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi
and Senate Majority Leader Reid -- the
"Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act" (PPACA) -- contained no such
language. Instead, we find
an array of abortion-expanding
provisions, concealed behind a
hodge-podge of artful exercises in
misdirection, bookkeeping gimmicks,
loopholes, and provisions that are
rigged to expire.
President Obama tried to further cloak
the abortion-expansive provisions of the
bill with a hollow executive order --a
document that was dismissed by the
president of Planned Parenthood as a
"symbolic gesture."
Last July, while implementing the very
first major component of the law, the
Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan
program, HHS happily approved
state-submitted plans that explicitly
covered elective abortions. When
National Right to Life threw a spotlight
on this development, the administration
made a discretionary decision to exclude
abortion from the program, although
nothing in the PPACA prohibited such
abortion coverage.
Laura Murphy of the American Civil
Liberties Union said, “What is
disappointing is that there is nothing
in the law that requires the Obama
administration to impose this broad and
highly restrictive abortion ban.”
Nancy-Ann DeParle, the head of the White
House Office of Health Reform, assured
the pro-abortion activists that the
discretionary decision to exclude
abortion from the PCIP program “is not a
precedent for other programs or
policies" under the PPACA.
You can bet on that. The PPACA
explicitly authorizes refundable "tax
credits" (essentially, entitlement
payments that are not related to actual
tax liability) to purchase health plans
that will cover all abortions -- a sharp
break from the principles of the Hyde
Amendment. The PPACA authorizes the
Office of Personnel Management to
administer "multi-state" plans that are
implicitly authorized to cover elective
abortions. The PPACA provides $9.5
billion in funding for community health
centers, which pro-abortion activists
have targeted as new abortion-providing
sites, without any restriction on the
use of these funds for abortion. And the
list goes on.
These abortion-expansive provisions
would be corrected by enactment of the
Protect Life Act (H.R. 358), sponsored
by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.). The bill is
closely patterned on the Stupak-Pitts
Amendment -- indeed, Prof. Sara
Rosenbaum of the George Washington
University School of Public Health,
testifying against the bill,
acknowledged, "I would say this bill
would bring health reform into line with
what originally was Stupak-Pitts."
The bill also contains important
safeguards to prevent health care
providers from being penalized for
refusing to participate in providing
abortions. Such protections are badly
needed in the face of accelerating
campaigns by groups such as the ACLU and
the
National Health Law Program to force
individual and institutional healthcare
providers to choose between providing
abortions or abandoning the healing
arts.
What is ultimately needed, however, is a
clear, comprehensive, uniform policy to
prevent federal subsidies for abortion.
This would be provided by enactment of
the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act
(H.R. 3), introduced by Rep. Chris Smith
(R-NJ) and Dan Lipinski (D-Il.),
currently with 208 cosponsors. The House
Judiciary Committee will mark up H.R. 3
on March 3.
Opponents of these bills have
frantically sought to manufacture
diversionary issues, such as the claim
that the Smith-Lipinski bill contains
tax hikes (imaginary), or that the Pitts
bill would somehow discourage insurers
from covering treatments for injuries
caused by abortions (utterly baseless).
The core policies contained in these
bills have already been in effect for
decades for the FEHB program, Medicaid,
the military and most other federal
health programs, and experience belies
the imaginative claims to the opponents.
During the initial congressional debates
over federal funding of abortion during
the 1970s, the pro-abortion side engaged
in similar scare tactics -- claiming,
for example, that the Hyde Amendment
would result in a huge increase in
abortion-related morbidity and
mortality. Instead, there was no
measurable increase at all -- but, as I
noted in
recent congressional testimony,
another dramatic effect did occur: Well
over one million Americans are alive
today, who otherwise would have died in
federally funded abortions.
According to the Guttmacher Institute,
this is a "tragic result." But anyone
who advocates "abortion reduction" -- a
goal to which even President Obama has
given lip service -- should embrace the
Pitts and Smith-Lipinski bills to codify
and extend the principles and the
lifesaving effects of the Hyde
Amendment.
Douglas Johnson is the legislative
director of the
National Right to Life Committee.
Part
Two
Part Three
