Abortion Issue Could Derail Health Care Overhaul
By Julie Rovner, NPR News
July 14, 2009
This story comes from our partner NPR
More than nearly any other issue, abortion has the potential to throw a wrench into the already fragile gears of the major health care overhaul now starting to churn on Capitol Hill.
“I take a view that there’s almost anything [that can be compromised] in public affairs except probably the issue of abortion,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, one of the leading Republicans seeking a bipartisan health bill.
Already in the House, 19 Democrats have written House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowing not to vote for any health bill that includes abortion funding.
“We cannot support any health-care reform proposal unless it explicitly excludes abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan,” said the letter, whose lead signers included Reps. Dan Boren of Oklahoma, Bart Stupak of Michigan and Minnesota’s Collin Peterson.
On Monday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the only one of five congressional committees overseeing the health effort that is actually drafting its bill, debated a half dozen abortion-related amendments.
It defeated most on identical 12-11 votes, including one that would have barred people who get government insurance subsidies from buying private insurance plans that include abortion coverage.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said the principle is the same as the one that currently bans funding for abortion in the Medicaid program for the poor.
“You are taking federal tax dollars and using them to provide abortion services,” he said. “The rest of the people in this country should not be paying for [those] services through their tax dollars.”
But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said that not letting people use what might be very small subsidies to buy private coverage was going too far.
“The next step in this logic will be to require anybody seeking these services to walk to the clinic, lest they use federal highways, supported by federal highway funds,” he said.
The committee’s debate was relatively brief, but the abortion issue hangs over the health overhaul effort like a dark, menacing cloud.
Abortion foes, like Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee, say President Obama and congressional leaders plan to use the health care effort to dramatically increase the availability of abortion services.
“These bills give federal officials the authority to define what benefits must be carried in all health insurance plans, both private and in the government plan that’s proposed,” he said. “And there is no doubt whatever that abortion, elective abortion, would be among those services mandated.”
Johnson says than extending existing government abortion funding bans to people who get government subsidies to buy private insurance is a logical extension of a long-standing — and long-settled — policy.
“There has been a consensus at the congressional level since the mid-1970s that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for elective abortion, and that’s simply the principle that we seek to preserve here,” he said.
And it’s not just government-run plans that bar abortion, he notes. It’s government-subsidized plans, too. The program that covers federal workers and their families — as well as members of Congress — he says “is a program that involves hundreds of private insurance plans, but in order to participate in the program, by act of Congress, the plans may not cover abortion, except to save the life of the mother, or in cases of rape and incest. So elective abortions are not covered under that program because it is federally subsidized.”
But Democratic pollster Mark Mellman says such a restriction may not go over so well with the public.
“Right now most health care plans cover abortion, cover contraception, cover women’s reproductive health,” he said. “To some extent what they’re talking about on Capitol Hill is taking away coverage that people already have. Americans want health care reform. But they will oppose health care reform if it takes away the coverage they now have for things like abortion and contraception.”
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., says that ensuring women have health care equal to men is a simple matter of fairness.
“I believe that our health care reform bill will make sure that women get access to the health care that they need, the same as men do every day,” she said.
But does Congress need to be having this debate at all?
Mellman says a poll he did recently for the National Women’s Law Center found that 75 percent of respondents would prefer to have an independent commission of medical professionals and citizens, rather than lawmakers, make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be covered.
“They do not want politicians making health care coverage decisions. In fact, they want to keep politicians as far away from these coverage decisions as possible,” he said.
Politicians, however, have a habit of not delegating decisions to others — particularly decisions regarding hot-button issues like abortion.
This information was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives and sign up for email delivery. © Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
To learn more:
- Go to Kaiser Health News’ Web site.
- Listen of Julie Rovner’s NPR report.
Category: Ethics, Female Reproductive System, Health Insurance, Health-care Policy, Healthcare Reform, Sexual Health, Women's Health
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Keep in mind that in his 1977 book, Ecoscience, Obama's new science czar, John Holden advocated forced abortion and sterilization to rid society of what he regarded as socially troublesome groups. Note too that in a recent NY Times Magazine interview, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said:
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe [v. Wade] was decided, there was concern
about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to
have too many of."
Notice, most revealingly, that Ginsberg didn't think that the motivation behind Roe require her as a liberal to do anything. If fact, I once had a liberal professor who pointed at a young black man nearby and whispered conspiratorially, "That's why we need abortion."
The same is true of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. In her 1922 bestseller, the Pivot of Civilization, she argued that civilization depends (pivots) on keeping the birthrates of the unfit (in her day mostly immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe) below that of her sort of people, generally the fashionable well-to-do living in big cities.
No discussion of government funded health care is complete without a discussion of how useful it would be those who intend, as Ginsburg put it, to reduce the "growth in populations we don't want to have too many of." With people like Holdren making policy and judges like Ginsburg issuing rulings from the bench, certain populations would find government-funded abortion much easier to get than prenatal care.