Obama Says "Government Funding of Abortion"
is "Fabrication,"
But the White House-Backed House Bill
Explicitly Authorizes It
WASHINGTON (August 19, 2009)
-- In a conference call with supporters this
afternoon, President Obama said that it is a
"fabrication" to say that the legislation
backed by the White House would result in
"government funding of abortions," and that
this is "untrue." The following comment may
be attributed to Douglas Johnson,
legislative director for the National Right
to Life Committee (NRLC), the national
federation of state and local right-to-life
organizations:
Emboldened by the recently
demonstrated superficiality of some organs
of the news media, President Obama today
brazenly misrepresented the abortion-related
component of the health care legislation
that his congressional allies and staff have
crafted. As amended by the House Energy and
Commerce Committee on July 30 (the
Capps-Waxman Amendment), the bill backed by
the White House (H.R. 3200) explicitly
authorizes the government plan to cover all
elective abortions. Obama apparently seeks
to hide behind a technical distinction
between tax funds and government-collected
premiums. But these are merely two types
of public funds, collected and spent by
government agencies. The Obama-backed
legislation makes it explicitly clear that
no citizen would be allowed to enroll in the
government plan unless he or she is willing
to give the federal agency an extra amount
calculated to cover the cost of all elective
abortions -- this would not be optional.
The abortionists would bill the federal
government and would be paid by the federal
government. These are public funds, and
this is government funding of abortion.
In 2007 Obama explicitly
pledged to Planned Parenthood that the
public plan will cover abortions (see the
video clip
here). Some journalists have reported
that Obama "backed off" of this commitment
in an interview with Katie Couric of CBS
News, broadcast July 21, but Obama actually
carefully avoided stating his intentions --
instead, he simply made an
artful observation that "we also have a
tradition of, in this town, historically, of
not financing abortions as part of
government funded health care."
It is true that there is such
a tradition -- which Obama has always
opposed, and which the Obama-backed bill
would shatter.
On August 13, NRLC released a
detailed memo explaining the provisions of
the pending bills that would affect abortion
policy, with citations to primary
sources. Many of the "factcheck" articles
that have appeared in the news media in
recent weeks reflect, at best,
unsophisticated understandings of the
provisions they purport to be explaining,
and also give evidence of a weak
understanding of Obama's history on the
policy issues involved. The memo is
downloadable in PDF format here:
http://www.nrlc.org/AHC/HR3200NRLCfactsheet.pdf
To go to the main index on
abortion in health care, click
here.
To go to the NRL Action Alert on abortion in
health care, click
here.
To go to the NRLC home page, click
here.
To go to the StopTheAbortionAgenda.com video
site, click
here.
