National Right to Life letter to Senator Casey:

Your "compromise" does not fix abortion problems

WASHINGTON (December 18, 2009) -- The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the federation of right-to-life organizations in all 50 states, today sent a letter to Senator Robert Casey, Jr. (D-Pa.), expressing its strong opposition to language Casey proposed regarding subsidies for insurance plans that cover abortion on demand.

NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson and Senior Legislative Counsel Susan T. Muskett wrote, in part:

We believe that your proposed language in no way improves the highly objectionable provisions of the Reid bill that authorize subsidies for health plans that cover elective abortion, and that authorize federal mandates for private health plans to cover elective abortion.

...The Reid bill, as modified by your proposal, would effectively enshrine in federal law the doctrine that elective abortion is routine health care, and then deign to allow individual citizens to declare themselves to be conscientious objectors.  This is a political fig leaf for a pro-abortion policy – and a cellophane fig leaf, at that. 

On December 8, the Senate tabled an amendment sponsored by Senators Ben Nelson (D-Ne.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.) that would have removed elective abortion from the new federal programs that would be created by pending health care legislation.

The letter also notes that the already objectionable abortion provisions in the Reid bill were made worse on December 3 when the Senate adopted the Mikulski Amendment.  The Mikulski Amendment empowers the Department of Health and Human Services to compel every private health plan in the country to include coverage of all abortions, merely by listing abortion as a “preventive” service.  Senator Ben Nelson voted against the Mikulski Amendment for this reason.  As NRLC explained in a November 30 letter to the Senate opposing the Mikulski Amendment, some pro-abortion authorities have already started describing abortion as a “preventive” health service.

A PDF of the NRLC letter to Senator Casey is available here:

http://www.nrlc.org/AHC/CaseyProposalNRLCOppositionLetter.pdf

The National Right to Life Committee, the nation's largest pro-life group, is a federation of affiliates in all 50 states and 3,000 local chapters nationwide.